'Public Enemies' Update: 1st minute of Little Bohemia shootout on Youtube!

[ShootingJames]

Dillinger would go to the chicago police dept, and to different stations across the country because he got a kick out of it. He often changed his look though, and remember a lot of cops back then were not even high school educated. They gave the jobs to anyone big and strong, and in those days nobody turned the jobs down as it was the depression. Cops in 1933 are not like cops in 2009.

Also, Dillinger's gang robbed 2 or 3 police stations to steal guns.

In Chicago, Dillinger used the name of another criminal who was a dead ringer for him too, they looked very much alike. I can't remember the fellows name. Jimmy something or other. The other guy could never pull off Dillinger, but there was a big conspiracy about it when they gunned him down, that it was the other guy, not Dillinger, that Purvis and the FBI had screwed up again.

He used Capone/mob armorers. He was never in the mob, but he used their resources when he needed too. He was famous, so they liked having him around. He was like a rock star. And he payed his own way with that stuff too. he payed them well.

I saw the film this weekend, and I absolutely loved it. It was not particularly accurate in some ways, but it was amazingly accurate in some of the best ways. The ending was pretty amazing, even though the very, very end of it was pure fantasy, it put an emotional exclamation point on the film that I thought really worked.

There is an HBO documentary/behind the scenes playing, and there are some really great books about Dillinger that Mann obviously read as research.

Other than not having him change his look, and they truncated some timeframe stuff, it was probably the most accurate portrayal of the Dillinger story I've seen.

If you get a chance to see that jailhouse interview/reel, they did an excellent job of recreating that. The flares. The airplanes of the time. The weapons used. I'm not sure Dillinger ever used that 38 super himself. It was part of his gang's arsenal.