DILLINGER

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 350, 8 March 1946, Page 18

DILLINGER

(Monogram )

RECOMMEND Dillinger to the notice of the Howard League for Prison Reform as a likely means of winning friends and influencing people.

For, as far as one can see from the fim, it was simply the fact of being sent to jail, where he consorted with hardened criminals, that turned young John Dillinger into America’s Public Enemy No. 1. This may, of course, be an entirely incorrect inference, but in the circumstances it is a logical. one. I don’t know anything about Dillinger’s early life and I cannot summon up enough interest to do the necessary research, but it is quite possible that research would reveal that his criminal tendencies were due to heredity, or environment, or bad upbringing or something of that sort, and that he would have become a ruthless killer even if he hadn’t gone to prison for a minor stick-up undertaken in a spirit of bravado and there fallen into the company of "Specs," the bankrobber, and other tough guys serving a long stretch. Just by looking at the film you can’t answer that question, because the film isn’t interested in why Dillinger became a.cold-blooded scoundrel who bust banks wide open all over the country, bumped off numerous people who stood in his way (including two of his associates), made what appears to have been the major error of his career by robbing ® mail train (because that brought in the Federal authorities), and was finally betrayed by his girl-friend to G-Men, who shot him down as he came out of a cinema. The film is only interested in the fact (if it is a fact) that these thing# were done by him or happened to him. Yet although in these respects the film is inadequate in its treatment of its subject, it is as far as it goes a pretty good piece of straight reporting, reminescent of some of the early gangster melodramas: terse, economical, utterly unsentimental, as tough in its own way as Dillinger was in his. It would have been extremely interesting to know just how much the preponderantly adolescent audiences were taking to heart the lesson of the film, announced in a foreword: that just as the first World War spawned trigger-happy criminals like Dillinger, so the war just ended may produce similar types who in turn will have to learn that CRIME DOES NOT PAY. If they weren’t taking this to heart, the fault could scarcely lie with the film, for there is nothing glamorous or heroic about the life and death of John Dillinger, as enacted here with appropriate nastiness by Lawrence Tierney, adequately supported by Edmund Lowe, Edouard Cianelli, Elisha Cook Jr. and other convincing screen criminals.