John Dillinger - Film Depictions

Film Depictions

  • 1945: Lawrence Tierney played the title role in the first film dramatization of Dillinger's career; Dillinger.
  • 1957: Director Don Siegel's film Baby Face Nelson, starred Mickey Rooney as Nelson and Leo Gordon as Dillinger.
  • 1959: The FBI Story starring James Stewart, Jean Willes plays Anna Sage and Scott Peters plays Dillinger. Peters, a small-time actor, went uncredited in this role.
  • 1969: Director Marco Ferreri's film Dillinger Is Dead includes documentary footage of real John Dillinger as well as newspaper clips.
  • 1973: Dillinger, directed and written by John Milius with Warren Oates in the title role, presents the gang in a much more sympathetic light, in keeping with the anti-hero theme popular in films after Bonnie and Clyde (1967).
  • 1979: Lewis Teague directed the film The Lady in Red, starring Pamela Sue Martin as the eponymous lady in the red dress. However, in this film, it is Dillinger's girlfriend Polly in red, not the Romanian informant Anna Sage (Louise Fletcher). Sage tricks Polly into wearing red so that FBI agents can identify Dillinger (Robert Conrad) as he emerges from the cinema.
  • 1991: A TV film Dillinger, starring Mark Harmon
  • 1995: Roger Corman produced the film Dillinger and Capone, featuring Martin Sheen as Dillinger and F. Murray Abraham as Al Capone. Dillinger survives the theater stakeout when the FBI mistakenly gun down his brother and is then blackmailed by Capone into retrieving $15 million from his secret vault.
  • 2009: Director Michael Mann's film Public Enemies is an adaptation of Bryan Burrough's book Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34. The film features Johnny Depp as John Dillinger and Christian Bale as FBI agent Melvin Purvis. Although the film has accurate portrayals of several key moments in Dillinger's life - such as his death and dialogue at his arraignment hearing - it is inaccurate in some major historical details, such as the timeline of deaths of key criminal figures including Pretty Boy Floyd and Baby Face Nelson.
  • 2012: British actor Alexander Ellis portrays Dillinger in the first Dollar Baby screen adaptation of Stephen King's The Death of Jack Hamilton.

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