Public enemies

Movie
German title	Public enemies
Original title	Public enemies
Country of production	United States
original language	English
Publishing year	2009
length	140 minutes
Age rating	FSK 12 ; JMK 14
Rod
Director	Michael Mann
script	Ronan Bennett , ; Michael Mann, ; Ann Biderman
production	Kevin Misher , ; Michael Mann
music	Elliot Goldenthal
camera	Dante Spinotti
cut	Paul Rubell , ; Jeffrey Ford
occupation
synchronization

Public Enemies (German: Staatsfeinde ) is a US- American feature film by Michael Mann . The real-life film is an adaptation of Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34 by Bryan Burrough . The film premiered on August 6, 2009 in Germany and on August 7, 2009 in Austria.

action

In 1933, in Michigan City ( Indiana ) State Prison, captured bank robbers Walter Dietrich, Charles Makley, Harry Pierpont and Ed Shouse managed to overpower some guards with the help of smuggled weapons. At the same time, gang leader John Dillinger and his partner John "Red" Hamilton gain access to the entrance area of the detention center, while Hamilton, disguised with a police badge, pretends to hand over Dillinger to serve another prison sentence. Together, the gang members can disarm other guards and take control of the main gate. However, when Shouse kills one of the judicial officers in a fit of rage, a scuffle breaks out in which a shot goes off, which alerts the guards on the towers of the prison wall. Instead of escaping unmolested in the uniforms of the guards - as originally planned, the gangsters only reach their getaway car after an intense firefight in which Dietrich, Dillinger's friend and mentor, is fatally wounded. Dillinger then separates from Shouse, whom he blames for Dietrich's death by throwing him out of the moving car. Following the advice of the corrupt police officer Zarkovich, the four remaining gang members make their way to Chicago , 30 miles west , where they find themselves under the protection of the local Criminal Syndicate.

In East Liverpool ( Ohio ) that can FBI -Beamte Melvin Purvis and his men the fugitive criminals Pretty Boy Floyd ask. Purvis shoots Floyd after a wild chase in an orchard and is then presented to the press as a heroic figure by FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover . Hoover declares war on the crime and assigns Purvis to find John Dillinger.

In the meantime, Dillinger, who is keeping the country in suspense with further spectacular bank robberies, has fallen in love with the cloakroom attendant Billie Frechette and has a relationship with her. While searching for Dillinger, Purvis comes across the equally notorious gangster Baby Face Nelson , who, however, kills an agent and then escapes. Purvis then calls for the assistance of some die-hard law enforcement officers from the southern states, who, led by Texan Charles Winstead, arrive in Chicago shortly afterwards.

For a stay in Tucson ( Arizona ) Dillinger and his men are arrested by the police after they found in her hotel room weapons. The bank robbers are extradited to Indiana and put on trial there. After the windy attorney Piquett managed to postpone the start of the trial by a month, Dillinger uses the time gained to escape from the local prison with a self-made dummy pistol. However, he cannot meet with Billie, as she is under surveillance by the FBI, and also loses the support of the Chicago Mafia, as their boss Frank Nitti sees his crooked sports betting business endangered by the police actions carried out in the search for Dillinger.

Together with his old friend "Red" Hamilton, former gang member Ed Shouse, Tommy Carroll, Homer Van Meter and Baby Face Nelson , who he actually hated because of his unpredictability , Dillinger plans a robbery on the bank of Sioux Falls ( South Dakota ) in which should be a significant amount of money. With the hoped-for booty he also wants to free Pierpont and Makley from prison. However, the raid ends in a bloodbath in which several passers-by and police officers are killed. Carroll remains behind with a shot in the head and is believed dead by his cronies, but falls into the hands of the FBI and under torture reveals to Purvis the meeting place for the rest of the gang members - the remote little bohemia lodge near Rhinelander in the Wisconsin forests . On the night of April 22, 1934, the agents storm Dillinger's hiding place, which leads to another violent firefight, in the course of which, in addition to a few uninvolved civilians, an FBI officer and four of the five bank robbers are killed. Dillinger manages to escape.

In Chicago, Dillinger, who was declared "Public Enemy No. 1" by the FBI, lives with Billie for a short time until the police get hold of her. Although she is abused by the brutal agent Harold Reinecke without Purvis' knowledge, she does not reveal the whereabouts of her lover. Dillinger arrives at the brothel owner Anna Sage under, but betrays him to the police, her than Purvis with deportation to their home Banat threatened. While Dillinger visited the Clark Gable film “ Manhattan Melodrama ” on July 22, 1934 with Anna and Polly Hamilton, one of their ladies, FBI agents were posted in front of the cinema. When leaving the cinema, Dillinger becomes suspicious; but he can no longer draw his weapon and is shot, among others, by Agent Winstead. He looks for Billie in prison to tell her the last words of her lover: “Bye bye, Blackbird” (for example: “Farewell, my blackbird”) - the title of the song in which Dillinger and Billie first met.

Reviews

“Star-studded and stylized gangster film with great action scenes and an outstanding Johnny Depp. Unfortunately a bit cool and emotionless. "

- Cinema

“As expected,“ Public Enemies ”is absolutely perfectly equipped. Even if Mann uses the Great Depression only as a historical backdrop and does little to explain the impact on the population in the plot, he is visually resurrecting an entire era. When crooks and cops engage in wild shootings, it looks like a lead-syringe version of the legendary street shoot-out in Heat . "Public Enemies" have many scenes of this quality, which also include a night chase. [...] »Public Enemies« shines with a multitude of individual scenes, some of which are grandiose, without the big picture being really round. "

- Carsten Baumgardt, filmstarts.de

“Big gangsters need the best documentarists: Michael Mann's review of John Dillinger's entry into the myth of US criminal history is A-class action cinema. "Public Enemies" does not have the relationship complexity and the emotional weight of "Heat", but [...] even with his tenth directorial work, Mann remains the unmatched chronicler of the eternal duel between cops and gangsters. Here, too, he revolves around his themes of loyalty and betrayal, character parallels in contrasting lifestyles, adherence to principles and coolness even under the greatest heat. [...] The approach to the masterful epic succeeds the film especially in the second half, when, among the various shootouts, a nighttime attack on the forest develops into a brilliant sequence typical for a man, when reality and Hollywood merge during a visit to the cinema by Dillinger, who ultimately sealed his death . A perfect and true ending for a man who loved celluloid and somehow lived it. "

- Peter Koberger, kino.de

"If Michael Mann hadn't filmed this gangster story in annoying digital technology, you'd have been dealing with a masterpiece: Because here Mann shows episodes from the life of gangster John Dillinger […] with great attention to detail. On the big screen, the peculiar digital aesthetics are enormously disturbing, creating a permanent distance and thus leaving a peculiar emptiness. The narrative style of the duel of the adversaries is just as strong as the actors and the equipment. "

- prism

“The battle between police and crime, as these astonishing details in Mann's film make clear, is no longer a duel between hero and villain at eye level, as we know it from the westerns and their descendants in gangster films. Instead of lassoing as a cowboy, the FBI agent is now throwing a surveillance network over the whole country. [...] So is the apparent anachronism that Michael Mann did not shoot his gangster epic on film but digitally, in truth none at all. The thirties in America, it is more clear, already knew that techno-totalitarianism that we experience today. "

- Johannes Binotto , Filmbulletin

“We congratulate Michael Mann on what is now his third attempt [...] to wrest an aesthetic of its own from digital high-definition technology [...]. [...] The costumes, cars and weapons of the thirties are conveyed into a kind of hyper-presence by the high-resolution optics and a nervous camera. […] Unlike in Heat […] Michael Mann abstains from any psychologization in Public Enemies. Instead, he celebrates the look of his heroes with the help of a detail-obsessed HD technology that gives every stubble, every sweat pore and every billowing coat fold its appearance. [...] Michael Mann succeeds in visualizing the past with this look. He just doesn't know what to do with this past. Michael Mann […] refuses to dive into any kind of historical or social depth. His main actor Johnny Depp also plays Dillinger with a closed sobriety that is just not supposed to give any insight into the gangster soul. But what is it all for? For a film about John Dillinger, which tells nothing essential about John Dillinger, is not particularly exciting and although the genre of the gangster film gains its own aesthetic, but no vision. Public Enemies may literally be a sensational work, but it glides through the synapses without consequences and without major residues. "

- Anne Leweke, Die Zeit

“The story is not worth mentioning and apart from two or three exciting moments, the film splashes past you for what feels like four hours without you ever really being interested in any of the characters. Bale and Depp are bored playing on autopilot, because more than two different emotions are never asked of them in the film. They remain - as is often the case with Mann - sketch drawings that speak in exclamation sentences. "

- Oliver Lysiak, moviepilot.de

“Neither interested in historical authenticity nor in psychograms, the neo-noir thriller revolves particularly around the structural change in America in the 1930s. A relational game with film-historical and pop-cultural set pieces, which is very entertaining as an exciting genre bricolage . "

- Lexicon of international film

Deviations from historical reality

Unlike in the movie, Pretty Boy Floyd died in October, after Dillinger, who was killed in July.
In the film, Dillinger frees his cronies from Michigan City jail. In fact, the outbreak took place without the gang leader, who was still in custody in Lima ( Ohio ) at the time and was only then freed by his people.
Unlike in the film, the attempted access to the bank robbers in the "Little Bohemia Lodge" ended in a fiasco for the FBI. All of the criminals escaped while an agent and a civilian were killed. Charles Winstead only joined Purvis' troop after this action and shortly before Dillinger's death.
Contrary to what is shown in the film, Dillinger was survived by most of the members of his gang, including Dietrich, Shouse, Nelson, Floyd and Van Meter, who were not killed until several months after him.

background

Mann dedicated the film to his friend Chuck Adamson , who died shortly before it was released. The retired police officer and future screenwriter Adamson had worked with Mann on numerous occasions since the late 1970s, and his accounts of true Chicago criminal cases were incorporated into Mann's script for Heat , among other things .

The German Film and Media Assessment (FBW) in Wiesbaden awarded the film the title valuable.

Cast and dubbing

The German dubbing was created under the dialogue direction of Axel Malzacher and the dialogue book by Klaus Bickert by the dubbing company Film- & Fernseh-Synchron GmbH in Munich .

Since Johnny Depp and Christian Bale are usually both dubbed by David Nathan, Sascha Rotermund took over the voice of Melvin Purvis.

Role name	actor	Voice actor
John Dillinger	Johnny Depp	David Nathan
Melvin Purvis	Christian Bale	Sascha Rotermund
Billie Frechette	Marion Cotillard	Natascha Geisler
John "Red" Hamilton	Jason Clarke	Dennis Schmidt-Foss
Homer Van Meter	Stephen Dorff	Florian Halm
Baby Face Nelson	Stephen Graham	Bernhard Völger
J. Edgar Hoover	Billy Crudup	Peter Flechtner
Charles Winstead	Stephen Lang	Frank Glaubrecht
Harry Pierpont	David Wenham	Tobias Kluckert
Alvin Karpis	Giovanni Ribisi	Gerrit Schmidt-Foss
Walter Dietrich	James Russo	Torsten Michaelis
Pretty boy Floyd	Channing Tatum	Axel Malzacher
Anna Sage	Branka Katić	Kirsta Brikner
Polly Hamilton	Leelee Sobieski	Kaya Marie Möller
Anna Patzke	Emilie de Ravin	-
Tommy Carroll	Spencer Garrett	Thomas Nero Wolff
Charles Makley	Christian Stolte	Marcus Off
Ed Shouse	Michael Vieau	Olaf Reichmann
Lawyer Louis Piquet	Peter Gerety	Helmut Gauss
Frank Nitti	Bill Camp	Udo Schenk
Agent Carter Baum	Rory Cochrane	Martin Kautz
Agent Harold Reinecke	Adam Mucci	Michael Iwannek
Agent John Madala	Shawn Hatosy	Tommy Morgenstern
Agent Julius Rice	Randy Ryan	Sven Gerhardt
Agent Sam Cowley	Richard Short	Rainer Fritzsche
Agent Warren Barton	Madison Dirks	Peter Lontzek
Agent William Rohrer	Kurt Naebig	Johannes Berenz
Cop Eyman	Randy Steinmeyer	Jörg Hengstler
Helen Gillis	Shanyn Leigh	Sarah Riedel
Judge Murray	John Lister	Roland Hemmo
Martin Zarkovich	John Michael Bolger	Kaspar Eichel
Phil D'Andrea	John Ortiz	Lutz Schnell
Robert Estill	Alan Wilder	Reinhard Kuhnert
Senator McKellar	Ed Bruce	Otto Mellies
Sheriff Lillian Holley	Lili Taylor	Martina Treger