Public Enemies is a 2009 American biographical crime film directed by Michael Mann, who co-wrote the screenplay with Ronan Bennett and Ann Biderman. It is an adaptation of Bryan Burrough's 2004 non-fiction book Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933–34. Set during the Great Depression, the film chronicles the final years of the notorious bank robber John Dillinger (Johnny Depp) as he is pursued by FBI agent Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale), Dillinger's relationship with Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard), as well as Purvis' pursuit of Dillinger's associates and fellow criminals John "Red" Hamilton (Jason Clarke), Homer Van Meter (Stephen Dorff), Harry Pierpont (David Wenham), and Baby Face Nelson (Stephen Graham).
Burrough originally intended to make a television miniseries about the Depression-era crime wave in the United States, but decided to write a book on the subject instead. Mann developed the project, and some scenes were filmed on location where they occurred, though the film is not entirely historically accurate. Public Enemies premiered in Chicago on June 19, 2009, and was released on July 1, 2009, by Universal Pictures. The film received generally positive reviews from critics and grossed $214.1 million worldwide against an $80–100 million budget.
Plot In 1933, John Dillinger infiltrates Indiana State Penitentiary, jailbreaking his crew. During the firefight, his mentor Walter Dietrich is shot and killed. Dillinger and company change clothes and eat at a nearby farm before driving to a safe house on Chicago's east-side.
After killing Charles Floyd, FBI agent Melvin Purvis is promoted by J. Edgar Hoover to lead the hunt for Dillinger. Purvis also uses modern methods to battle crime, from cataloging fingerprints to tapping telephone lines.
In between a series of bank robberies, Dillinger meets Billie Frechette at a restaurant and impresses her by buying her a fur coat. Frechette falls for Dillinger even after he reveals his identity, and they become inseparable.
Purvis leads a failed ambush of Dillinger at a hotel, and an FBI agent is killed by Baby Face Nelson, who escapes with Tommy Carroll. Purvis asks Hoover for additional, experienced agents to deal with the hardened killers. Intelligence officer Charles Winstead, of military background, subsequently arrives to assist Purvis.
Police arrest Dillinger and his gang in Tucson, Arizona, after a fire breaks out in their Hotel Congress. Dillinger is extradited to Indiana, where Sheriff Lillian Holley locks him up in the Lake County Jail in Crown Point. Using a fake gun to escape, he is unable to see Frechette, who is under tight police surveillance. Dillinger learns that Frank Nitti's associates won't help as the FBI has been prosecuting interstate crime thanks to him, imperiling Nitti's bookmaking racket. This severs Dillinger's ties with the Chicago Outfit, forcing him and Red Hamilton to seek money elsewhere.
Carroll goads a desperate Dillinger into robbing $800,000 from a bank in Sioux Falls with Baby Face Nelson. Both Dillinger and Carroll are shot, and have to leave Carroll behind. They retreat to the Little Bohemia Lodge in Manitowish Waters, Wisconsin, realizing their haul (~$46,000) is significantly less than expected. Dillinger hopes he can free the rest from prison, including Pierpont and Makley, but Hamilton convinces him this is unlikely. Dillinger longs to see Frechette again.
Purvis and his men apprehend Carroll and torture him for the gang's location. An ambush is organized at Little Bohemia. Dillinger and Hamilton break away, and agents Winstead and Hurt pursue them through the woods, engaging in a shootout that fatally wounds Hamilton. Nelson, Shouse, and Van Meter hijack a Bureau car, killing Purvis's partner Carter Baum in the process. After a car chase, Purvis and his men kill Nelson and the rest of the gang. Elsewhere, Hamilton dies from his injuries after warning Dillinger to let Frechette go.
Dillinger meets Frechette, telling her he will commit one more robbery to pay enough for them to escape together. He drops her off, thinking she is safe, but she is arrested and badly beaten for refusing to reveal his whereabouts. Winstead and Purvis eventually intervene to stop the abusive and violent interrogation. Dillinger organizes a train robbery with Alvin Karpis and the Barker Gang, intending to flee the country the next day. Receiving a note from Frechette through her lawyer, Louis Piquett, he is told not to break her out of jail as she will be released in two years.
Purvis enlists the help of Anna Sage, a "madam" and one of Dillinger's acquaintances, threatening her with deportation to Romania, unless she sets up Dillinger, to hide out at her brothel. They go out to see Manhattan Melodrama but when out of the theater, are met by Purvis and other agents who awaited them. Dillinger spots the police unit but is shot before he can aim. Winstead kneels down beside the dying Dillinger to hear his last words. Purvis informs Hoover of Dillinger's death as bystanders begin to crowd around his body.
Winstead visits Frechette in prison; she already knows about Dillinger's death. He tells her that he thinks his dying words were, "Tell Billie for me, 'Bye, bye, Blackbird.'" Frechette sheds tears as Winstead leaves. Closing titles explain that Purvis quit the FBI a year later and committed suicide in 1960, and Frechette was released after two years.
Cast Johnny Depp as John Dillinger, a notorious and charismatic bank robber whom the FBI declares to be "Public Enemy No. 1". Depp was involved in a film adaptation of Shantaram which was postponed in late 2007, allowing him to star in Public Enemies. He was officially cast that December. Depp described Dillinger as a "...man of the people...There is a Robin Hood edge to John Dillinger."Reynolds, Dean; On the trail of John Dillinger , CBS News, retrieved on 28 June 2018 and "that era's rock and roll star. He was a very charismatic man and he lived the way he wanted to and didn't compromise." He felt "some kind of inherent connection" to Dillinger through one of his grandfathers, who ran moonshine, and his stepfather, who committed burglaries and robberies and spent time in the same prison Dillinger helped his associates escape from. Depp could not find a recording of Dillinger's own voice, but did find recordings of Dillinger's father. He said when he heard Dillinger's father's voice, "I started to do the math and think, 'Well, he was raised basically a farm boy in southern Indiana.' [...] I was born and raised in Owensboro, Kentucky, which is about 70 miles from where Dillinger was born and that's when it all clicked for me. I knew how he moved. I knew how he talked." Christian Bale as Melvin Purvis. Bale was not familiar with who Purvis was before making the film and "spent a great deal of time" with Purvis' son Alston and met other family and friends of Purvis, who died in 1960. Bale said he "never viewed Purvis as having a real personal zeal for taking down Dillinger. I think that he was somebody who was very understanding in acknowledging why the public felt Dillinger to be almost a hero. He wasn't unaware of the problems of the day and the terrible deprivation of the majority of the population." He thought Purvis' "driving motivation was that he truly believed in Hoover and had a great desire to realize Hoover's brilliant vision. That's really what I played with in my mind throughout this movie was the conflict between wanting to achieve that vision but recognizing Hoover's own compromises which Purvis wasn't entirely happy with making. In fact, very unhappy with making." Marion Cotillard as Billie Frechette, a singer and coat check girl who immediately becomes John Dillinger's love interest. Cotillard was cast after Nine (2009) was postponed. Multiple American actresses also wanted the part; Mann found Cotillard "focused and artistically ambitious". She trained herself to speak in a French-Canadian-Menominee-Wisconsin-Chicago accent and spoke only English for three months during filming. Cotillard "really wanted to know about [Frechette's] childhood" and met with relatives of Frechette in northern Wisconsin. "At a young age, she was sent to a boarding school, and it was a very difficult place where they tried to erase everything that was Indian in her. And I think that she encountered there a great injustice, and she shared with Dillinger a suspicion of authority. I think the two of them saw that in each other and they fell in love immediately, and there was a very strong connection between them", Cotillard said. Billy Crudup as J. Edgar Hoover. Crudup was cast as the future director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation by April 2008.
Production
Development
Public Enemies is based on Bryan Burrough's 2004 non-fiction book, Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933–34. Burrough had originally begun researching the subject with the aim of creating a miniseries. The idea was accepted by HBO and Burrough was made an executive producer, along with Robert De Niro's Tribeca Productions, and was asked to write the screenplay. Burrough had no experience in screenwriting, and says his drafts were probably "very, very bad. Ishtar bad." He began simultaneously writing a non-fiction book, which he found easier, spending two years working on it while the interest in the miniseries disappeared.
Burrough's book was set to be published in the summer of 2004 and he asked HBO to return the movie rights. They agreed and after the book was released, the rights were re-sold to production companies representing Michael Mann and Leonardo DiCaprio, the latter of whom was interested in playing John Dillinger. Burrough met with a representative and then heard nothing for three years. DiCaprio eventually left the project to appear in Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island.
Mann had written a screenplay about Alvin Karpis in the 1970s for producer Harold Hecht, which was never produced. After reading an excerpt from Burrough's book in Vanity Fair, he eventually worked to develop a film based on the book with producer Kevin Misher. Novelist and screenwriter Ronan Bennett had written a screenplay about Che Guevara which Mann had intended to develop, but the project was shelved as Steven Soderbergh was already working on his two-part biopic about Guevara. Starting in 2006, Bennett worked for over 18 months on adapting Burrough's book, writing several drafts.
Former NYPD Blue writer and Southland creator Ann Biderman rewrote the screenplay with Mann, who polished it before shooting began. Of the screenplay, Burrough has said "it's not 100 percent historically accurate. But it's by far the closest thing to fact Hollywood has attempted, and for that I am both excited and quietly relieved."
Filming Principal photography began in Columbus, Wisconsin on March 17, 2008 and continued in the Illinois cities of Chicago, Aurora, Joliet and Lockport; and the Wisconsin cities of Oshkosh, Beaver Dam, Columbus, Darlington, Milwaukee, Madison and several other places in Wisconsin; including the Little Bohemia Lodge in Manitowish Waters, Wisconsin, the actual location of a 1934 gun fight between Dillinger and the FBI. Some parts of the film were shot in Crown Point, Indiana, the town where Dillinger was imprisoned and escaped from jail. The actual 1932 Studebaker used by Dillinger during a robbery in Greencastle, Indiana was used during filming in Columbus, borrowed from the nearby Historic Auto Attractions museum.