Hunt for Dillinger (1945)

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Movie
German title Hunt for Dillinger
Original title Dillinger
Country of production United States
original language English
Publishing year 1945
length 90 minutes
Age rating FSK 16
Rod
Director Max Nosseck
script Philip Yordan ,
Leon Charles
production Maurice King ,
Franklin King
music Dimitri Tiomkin
camera Jackson Rose
cut Otho Lovering ,
Edward Mann
occupation

Hunt for Dillinger (original title Dillinger ) is an American gangster film. Directed by Max Nosseck , Lawrence Tierney plays John Dillinger , the first person to be named Public Enemy No. 1 by the FBI . Dillinger and his gang specialized in bank robberies. Anne Jeffreys and Edmund Lowe play the other leading roles in this autobiographical story.

action

At the end of a weekly newsreel, the "heroic deeds" of gangster John Dillinger are reported in detail . Dillinger's father speaks to the cinema audience and tells them about his son's youth in Indiana . He admits that his son was headstrong and very ambitious even as a child, but that his childhood was otherwise completely normal.

Soon after John left his home, he tried his luck in Indianapolis and worked for a small wage in a so-called moonlight bar . When an acquaintance of his goes to the pub and wants a drink that is out of stock, John apologizes to her and goes to a nearby supermarket, where he deceives the employee by suggesting that he has a gun and is robbing the market for a $ 7.20 item. John is picked up by the police and ends up in jail . There he befriends his cellmate Specs Green, a veteran bank robber , and his gang members Marco Minnelli, Doc Madison and Kirk Otto. Impressed by Spec's self-confident and intelligent demeanor, John, whose sentence is shorter than that of the bank robbers, is determined to join them. After he is free again, he commits several robberies . At the box office, Dillinger flirts with Helen Rogers. Although Helen knows him from a mug shot , the young woman refuses to identify him in a confrontation and goes with him instead. After more robberies, John now wants to implement his plan to help Specs Green and his gang to escape from prison. He manages to get them firearms during a mission in the quarry . As soon as they have this in their hands, they shoot their way free and then commit a whole series of other bank robberies in the Midwest together with Dillinger . Your next destination is the Farmers Trust Bank , whose security system is extremely sophisticated. Specs Green tries to get another man on board, but John is able to convince the gang members that he has a better plan. The gangsters detonate gas bombs , rob the bank and escape unmolested. From this successful coup Dillinger takes over the leadership of the gang. First of all, the men split up and don't want to meet again for four weeks. John and especially Helen fall into a real shopping spree. They meet again after the agreed time in a lodge owned by Kirk Otto's foster parents. In the meantime, John Dillinger is considered "Public Enemy No. 1" in the country.

While the gang is in Tucson , John develops a toothache and reluctantly see a dentist. When the dentist starts the anesthesia, the police break into the treatment room and arrest Dillinger. Once again the gangster succeeds in fooling the police and the guards and escaping from the prison with a pistol carved out of wood and making contact with his gang. After John kills Specs because he believes he has betrayed him, he tries to rob a train with the gang. During this raid, Dillinger is wounded and Kirk Otto is killed. John, Marco Minnelli, Doc Madison and the new gang member Tony seek refuge again in the lodge of Kirk Otto's foster parents, where Helen is to stay for the time being. But since Kirk's death, the elderly couple have had scruples and want to call the police. Before they can do that, however, John kills both of them. When the lodge is surrounded by the police anyway, Marco and Doc surrender, John and Helen manage to escape to Chicago . After being able to hide there for months, John and Helen went to a cinema in July 1934. A reward of $ 15,000 has now been offered on John's head. Unaware that Helen's red dress she wears is a sign of identification, John is cornered by FBI agents as he leaves the cinema . When he tries to shoot his way free, he is shot down. When the FBI men later sift through his belongings, they discover that Dillinger only had $ 7.20 under his name.

background

The shooting took place from October 10th to the end of October 1944 in Big Bear Lake , California , USA . The film premiered in the USA on March 2, 1945, and was released again on July 5, 1947. In the Federal Republic of Germany Jagd auf Dillinger could be seen in the cinema for the first time on October 13, 1950, in Austria in January 1951. The film had various working titles, such as John Dillinger, Killer , John Dillinger, Gangster and John Dillinger . The film first ran on German television on January 12, 1991 on Pro7 .

The role of gangster Dillinger was Lawrence Tierney's first leading role in a film and remained the role with which his name was most associated, although he played other sadistic criminals during his film career. Some footage from Fritz Lang's film Gehetzt ( You Only Live Once ) was used in a bank robbery sequence . Many well-known facts from Dillinger's life were downplayed in the film, such as the massacre at the lodge. At first it was planned to focus the film more on the Romanian prostitute Anna Sage , the so-called Woman in Red . Philip Yordan, however, who was responsible for the script, swung the narrative arc to Dillinger. Monogram boss Steve Broidy would have liked veteran actor Chester Morris to play the lead, but Frank and Maurice King, the producers, had different ideas. Broidy reluctantly had to bend over and make do with 25-year-old newcomer Lawrence Tierney. Tierney is said to have been a nervous wreck during filming who kept running to the toilet. Anne Jeffreys was loaned to RKO Pictures to produce . Former silent film star Edmund Lowe played the role of Specs Green.

Despite (or because of) the initial hubbub about the movie was Dillinger a good deal for Monogram Pictures and produced more than 4 million US dollars one at the box office. Philip Yordan was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay in 1946 and started his career with this gangster epic. Lawrence Tierney's career also took off, although he was often offered roles as a sociopath as a result.

Further films

Even before Dillinger's violent death there were plans to make a film. However, the Hays Office and the FBI were of the opinion that such films were detrimental to the reputation of the United States, whereupon the major studios signed an agreement to flatly refuse such material for filming.

First the small studio Monogram Pictures Corp. dared to make the first film in 1944, which was then followed by others:

A short documentary from 1934 is entitled Dillinger: Public Enemy No. 1 . John Dillinger himself and Melvin Purvis appear in it. In 1957, Leo Gordon appeared as John Dillinger in the film adaptation of Baby Face Nelson ( This is how they all end ). The Italian feature film from 1968, Dillinger is dead , only has Dillinger's name in the title, with which the director merely wanted to imply that he considers Hollywood genre cinema to be dead. The film The Lady in Red dates from 1979 and mainly deals with Polly Hamilton, a friend of John Dillinger's last weeks, and Anna Sage, who Dillinger betrayed to the FBI. A Filipino film from 1992 also bears the title Dillinger . The Dillinger Conspiracy is the name of a 2006 television film that revolves around Polly Hamilton. Christian Bale and Johnny Depp appear as themselves in a 2009 video entitled On Dillinger's Trail .

John Dillinger

As depicted in the film, John Dillinger was born and raised in Indianapolis in 1903 and began his criminal career in 1924, when he was 21 years old. After being arrested after a supermarket robbery, he spent nine years in prison and subsequently led a gang of gangsters. After he was declared "Public Enemy No. 1" by J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI, he escaped two more times and was shot dead by FBI agents on July 22, 1934 while leaving a cinema. The woman who had betrayed him was a roommate of an acquaintance he was on good terms with, with whom he was at the cinema that evening. Anna Sage, the name of Poly Hamilton's roommate, was also in the cinema and wore a red dress as a distinguishing mark, which later led to her media nickname "Lady in Red". Years after Dillinger's death, rumors circulated in the United States that it was not him but his brother that was the actual victim of the shooting and that Dillinger escaped unharmed.

Reviews

The lexicon of international films came to the conclusion that this was "an effortlessly staged low-budget crime thriller that really tries to portray the life of the notorious gangster in a reportage-like style."

The Bishops' Conference of the United States ruled that the film about the notorious bank robber was clearly fictionalized but dramatically convincing. "Especially Tierney's wild eyes and his cold-blooded demeanor [are] convincing." The film shows "stylized violence, including willful murders." The rating was A-II (br), where A-II means "suitable for adults and young people".

TimeOut London judged that this “first conceptual gangster epic [was] an immoral, freely modeled story about public enemy No. 1 John Dillinger, which was produced cheaply using existing film material (stock footage). Tierney [give] a depressed psychopath who has the dubious talent for making headlines. Unemotional and rough on the edges, [be] the film a sobering inventory of a legendary myth. "

Awards

At the Academy Awards in 1946 , Philip Yordan was nominated for an Oscar in the “Best Original Screenplay” category for Dillinger Hunt . The Oscar went to Richard Schweizer for the film drama Marie-Louise .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Dillinger. In: Turner Classic Movies . Retrieved February 13, 2013 .
  2. ^ Hunt for Dillinger in the Lexicon of International FilmsTemplate: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used . Retrieved February 13, 2013.
  3. ↑ Dillinger at usccb.org.Retrieved February 9, 2016.
  4. ↑ Dillinger at TimeOut.com. Retrieved February 13, 2013.