Dillinger

Directed by JOHN MILIUS

Starring WARREN OATES, BEN JOHNSON, HARRY DEAN STANTON

Blu-ray

Released 3 JAN

This is the squalid flipside to a. Gone is the self-conscious folk hero patter, the slick threads, the logical moral compass, and the production of two very good looking corpses. In its place, a flop-sweat doused Warren Oates as Depression-era celebrity criminal John Dillinger, a bank robber par excellence whose gentlemanly, nonviolent manner has caused him to walk between the raindrops of federal scrutiny. The screws come down on him hard following a 1933 massacre where numerous FBI agents were murdered (he was not involved), and cigar-chomping field chief Melvin Purvis (Ben Johnson) opts to use this as an excuse to whack some of the high-flying names’s on the government’s most wanted list.