The Philosophy of Michael Mann by Palmer R. Barton Skoble Aeon J. Sanders Steven & Aeon J. Skoble & R. Barton Palmer

Author:Palmer, R. Barton, Skoble, Aeon J., Sanders, Steven & Aeon J. Skoble & R. Barton Palmer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2014-03-10T16:00:00+00:00

Everything seemed calm and peaceful. There were not many people around and little traffic. I had a clear, unobstructed view of the sidewalk on the opposite side.

Suddenly I saw a tall man fire two shots in quick succession. He seemed to be standing almost beside the man who was shot. The wounded man fell to the alley [a few steps down the street from the Biograph] without uttering a sound.33

In other words: (1) no cordon of officers; (2) no attempt on Dillinger’s part to find or use a gun; and (3) lethal shots fired from extremely close range.

In the film, we are positioned in front of Dillinger and tracking backward as he makes his way down the sidewalk of Lincoln Avenue (several blocks of which had been closed down by the production, a resident noted, and “redone in 1930 style: laid down streetcar tracks, re-fronted all the stores, and every evening thirty black sedans rolled off trucks and parked up and down both sides. . . . [Mann] had the set-up in place for a month—the local merchants made big $$”34). Our attention has already been drawn to the fact that it is a warm night by a banner—COOLED BY REFRIGERATION—dangling from the theater’s marquee (air conditioning was born in Chicago, meat capital of America, and Balaban & Katz, the movie theater impresarios, were important innovators of the process for exhibition venues35). Dillinger is meditating as he paces, self-conscious, uncomfortable, perhaps too aware. The Biograph’s marquee is receding in the distance, and men and women are flocking past, heading in the opposite direction. A man (one of a trio of specialist sharpshooters Purvis had called in and who failed spectacularly at Little Bohemia) finally slides up behind Dillinger, points his pistol—a pistol, not a Tommy gun, because “the police never took to the Thompson gun with the same enthusiasm as the gangsters”36 and because, possessing position and authority, they have no need for that “greatest aid to bigger and better business the criminal has discovered in this generation”37—and fires twice, the sound strangely thudding and echoing as if in some cavernous chamber. Dillinger has groped for a gun, but his arm has been jostled by one of the passers-by, and he has no hope of even raising it. One bullet comes through his cheek just below the eye, a second emerges from his chest. Bullets from behind. A look of astonishment on his features as he falls forward into the camera, dark blood gushing from his head. The man labeled J. Edgar Hoover’s “Public Enemy No. 1” is thus shown in Mann’s vision to merit the singular treatment of being executed summarily by agents of the government in lieu of standing trial and being subjected to a verdict. (Mark L. Robbins, superintendent of the Police Identification Bureau in Tucson and the man responsible for Dillinger’s capture there in January of that year, had in early July 1934 warned police officers “not to try to capture Dillinger alive” even though he had done so himself.

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