Anyone else notice that there seem to be a hell of a lot of successful bank robberies in the area of late? Any chance we’ve entered a new age of social banditry?

I can dream.

I finally saw Public Enemies, by the way. It was pretty much as I feared. There wasn’t even a pretense of historical accuracy, Johnny Depp was hopelessly miscast, and, worst of all, there was no mention of Dillinger’s, shall we say, most impressive endowment. That said, it was a Michael Mann flick, and he’s pretty competent hand when it comes to crime dramas, so it was fun to watch most of the time.

And Marion Cotillard absolutely nailed Billie Frechette. At least as I always pictured her in my schoolboy’s imagination.

That said, the historical accuracies disappoint.  The film opens with Melvin Purvis chasing Pretty Boy Floyd through an apple orchard. Floyd shoots at him (one-handed at one point!) with a Thompson submachine gun, and Purvis then single-handedly kills him with one shot from a European bolt-action hunting rifle (admittedly correct for the period.) However, history shows that this happened many weeks after Dillinger was killed; Floyd was armed with a pair of Colt pistols, one of which was converted to full auto; it was a cornfield, not an orchard; and while Purvis did indeed empty his snub-nose .38 Colt Detective Special at the fleeing Pretty Boy, it is believed to have been a rifle in the hands of one of the many other lawmen firing at the fugitive that ended Floyd’s life.

On the bright side, however, it looks like Johnny Depp’s one of the good guys when it comes to guns. From Yahoo News, via The Firearm Blog.

We see an awful lot of this face in the movie. The movie, frankly, is a study of this face. Now, Depp is an extremely talented actor; and what I am saying is motivated neither by snippiness nor mere envy. But Depp is too good-looking for this role. The reasoning behind the casting presumably was something like ‘Dillinger had charisma, he was like a rock-star, a rock star who robbed banks! We need a big name star who oozes eleven types of charisma …!’ But Dillinger’s was a rough-hewn, wild-frontier-throwback sort of charisma. He was, it is true, renowned for being graceful but in a rough, tough, streetfighter sort of way. Dillinger was an alley cat. Johnny Depp, on the other hand, is Johnny Fucking Depp. It underplays his beauty to say ‘he looks like a male model’, given that most male models would sacrifice a limb to look like him. But a male model, and a fancy-pants clothes horse, is what he is in this film, all the time, in every scene, all the way through. He’s more than smooth. He’s smoooooth. In Heat we saw the world through the perspective of the De Niro and Pacino characters; in Public Enemies we spend the whole time seeing Johnny Depp. The film needed a lead who looked like this:

And less like: