Johnny Depp stars as John Dillinger in Michael Mann’s PUBLIC ENEMIES
PUBLIC ENEMIES (Michael Mann, 2009)
BAMcinématek, BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
Monday, February 15, 5:00 & 8:00
Series continues through February 16
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
www.publicenemies.net
In the early years of talkies, around the time of the Great Depression, Hollywood — and America — fell in love with gangsters and gangster pictures. Edward G. Robinson, Paul Muni, and James Cagney became stars in such films as Little Caesar, Scarface, and Public Enemy. In 1967, right around the Summer of Love, the ultraviolent, highly stylized Bonnie and Clyde reinvigorated the genre, casting the notorious thieves as the can’t-miss glamorous duo of Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty, followed two years later by the can’t-miss glamorous duo of Paul Newman and Robert Redford as the title characters in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Then, in 2009, with the country deep into a recession and hot off the success of Ridley Scott’s American Gangster, powerhouse writer-director-producer Michael Mann (Thief, Miami Vice) went back to the 1930s for Public Enemies, a superb, exciting retelling of legendary bank robber and people’s hero John Dillinger.
Michael Mann on the set of PUBLIC ENEMIES, which is part of BAM tribute to the writer-director-producer
Based on the book by Bryan Burrough, who praised Mann in the L.A. Times for getting so many — if not all, of course — of the facts, details, and even nuances right, Public Enemies begins with a prison break engineered by Dillinger in 1933, revealing him to be a sly, clever, and extremely smooth criminal, a violent villain impossible not to love, especially as played by Johnny Depp. (Dillinger has previously been portrayed by such actors as Warren Oates, Lawrence Tierney, and even Mark Harmon.) Dillinger puts together his crew, which includes John “Red” Hamilton (Jason Clarke), Harry Pierpont (David Wenham), and Homer Van Meter (Stephen Dorff), and falls in love with coat-check girl Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard) as he proceeds on his well-publicized crime wave. A blustery J. Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup) sics master G-man Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale) on Dillinger, and the two play a cat-and-mouse game through the Midwest, with appearances by such other notorious gangsters as Pretty Boy Floyd (Channing Tatum), Frank Nitti (Bill Camp), Baby Face Nelson (Stephen Graham), and Alvin Karpis (Giovanni Ribisi). The bullets keep flying as Dillinger grows bolder and bolder and Purvis gets closer and closer. Public Enemies is a classy, handsome gangster picture for the modern age, a fun trip back to a time before billion-dollar bank bailouts, when certain thieves were more like Robin Hood than Bernie Madoff. Public Enemies is screening February 15 at 5:00 & 8:00 in the BAMcinématek series “Heat & Vice: The Films of Michael Mann,” a twelve-film, twelve-day tribute to the Chicago-born producer, director, and screenwriter, who turned sixty-three on the first day of the festival, February 5. The Emmy-winning, Oscar-nominated Mann will be at BAM on February 11 ($30, 7:30) for “An Evening with Michael Mann,” a conversation moderated by Bilge Ebiri at the BAM Harvey. The series continues through February 16 with such other Mann films as Ali, Manhunter, The Insider, and The Keep.
Disgraceful Nazi porn or searing allegory about the devastating after-effects of the Holocaust on victims as well as Europe as a whole? Lurid exploitation or sensitively drawn, poignant exploration of a severe case of Stockholm syndrome? You can decide for yourself when Liliana Cavani’s ever-so-kinky, extremely controversial 1974 drama, The Night Porter, screens at the very strange time of eleven o’clock in the morning February 5-7 as part of the IFC Center’s eight-film tribute to Charlotte Rampling, being held on the occasion of the release of her latest movie, 45 Years, which has earned the British actress, model, and singer her first Oscar nomination. Rampling is downright frightening as Lucia, a young woman who was tortured as a sex slave by SS officer Maximilian Theo Aldorfer (Dirk Bogarde) in a Nazi concentration camp. It’s now 1957, and Lucia has arrived in Vienna with her husband (Marino Masé), a prominent American conductor. Lucia and Max, who is the night porter at the fashionable Hotel zur Oper, instantly recognize each other, and the moment hangs in the air, neither sure what the other will do. They say nothing, and soon the two of them have seemingly journeyed back to the camp, involved in a dangerous descent into sex and violence behind closed doors. But a small group of Max’s Nazi friends, including Klaus (Philippe Leroy), Hans Folger (Gabriele Ferzetti), and Stumm (Giuseppe Addobbati), who have dedicated themselves to destroying documents — and witnesses — as former members of the SS are brought to trial, become suspicious of Max’s bizarre relationship with Lucia, who could make trouble for them all.
