History Film / PublicEnemies

** Some of the music featured is actually from the late 30s, such as swing music. And a Music/BillieHoliday record is heard in one scene (Holiday would begin her career in 1935), which Dillinger later uses as his LastWords.

** Hoover announces to reporters Purvis's assignment to the Chicago field office, saying "his task will be to get Public Enemy #1, John Dillinger." This is a scene happening in late 1933 - Dillinger wasn't named Public Enemy No. 1 until his 31st birthday on June 22, 1934.

** Some of the music featured is actually from the late 30s, such as swing music. And a Music/BillieHoliday record is heard in one scene (Holliday would begin her career in 1935), which Dillinger later uses as his LastWords.

** Some of the music featured is actually from the late 30s, such as swing music. And a Music/BillieHolliday record is heard in one scene (Holliday would begin her career in 1935), which Dillinger later uses as his LastWords.

** Some of the music featured is actually from the late 30s, such as swing music. And a Billie Holliday record is heard in one scene (Holliday would begin her career in 1935), which Dillinger later uses as his LastWords.

** Some of the music featured is actually from the late 30s, such as swing music. And a Billie Holliday record is heard in one scene (Holliday would begin her career in 1935)

* AgeLift: Baby Face Nelson died at the age of 25, while Stephen Graham was 35 during filming.

* EpicFail:
** Hoover reprimands Purvis over the phone for botching the attempt to capture Nelson, leading to Barton's death.
** See RetiredBadass for more on several real failed attempts to capture Dillinger.

* HistoricalBeautyUpdate: [[http://www.contactmusic.com/photos.nsf/main/branka_katic_5317311 Branka Katic]] and the woman she played, [[http://www.johndillingerhistoricalmuseum.4t.com/custom_1.html Anna Sage]] (real name Ana Campanas), the "Lady in Red".

* NiceJobFixingItVillain: Lowell Thomas, the radio commentator, mentions how we have Dillinger's instigation to thank for the tougher laws against interstate crime, and the gambling syndicate has this as a sarcastic reaction, since now the heat will be on ''their'' tidy coast-to-coast operation.
** And Dillinger was actually responsible for the passing of a number of important crime legislation bills. Nelson's shooting of Agent Carter Baum at Little Bohemia made killing a federal agent a federal offense, something Hoover had been lobbying for years to get passed.

** TruthInTelevision: The "College Boys" (as they were sarcastically nicknamed by local police departments) sucked when it came to engaging or capturing fugitives, with their incompetency being such that four times in as many weeks in April 1934, agents came within spitting distance of Dillinger but he managed to escape from them.[[labelnote:First attempt]]The first was in St. Paul on April 1, when FBI Agents Rufus Coulter and Rusty Nalls, and St. Paul Police Detective Henry Cummings stopped by an apartment Billie and Dillinger were living in, responding to a suspicious persons complaint. Billie woke Dillinger up, and Dillinger quickly started assembling his gun. Van Meter also showed up and spotted the detectives. After heading downstairs to his car, Agent Coulter followed him. When he got to the basement stairs, Van Meter opened fire on him and he ran for the car. Dillinger fired a burst at Cummings upstairs. Once the police were incapacitated, Dillinger, Billie and Van Meter escaped out an unguarded door.[[/labelnote]] [[labelnote:Second attempt]]A week later, Dillinger returned to his family's farm in Mooresville, Indiana, which the FBI had under surveillance. At one point, FBI car drove right [ast Dillinger and neither agent in the car recognized him.[[/labelnote]] [[labelnote:Third attempt]]The third time was Billie Frechette's capture, where agents walked mere feet from Dillinger as he sat in the car. He ultimately drove away without being seen. It was much like shown in the movie, except that Purvis was also present and actually realized too late that Dillinger had been in the car that Billie arrived in.[[/labelnote]] [[labelnote:Fourth attempt]]Little Bohemia was the fourth encounter, and the last straw. These incidents were the reason Hoover ordered men like Charles Winstead, Jerry Campbell, Clarence Hurt, and Herman Hollis to Chicago, for their marksmanship.[[/labelnote]]

Taking place in 1933, when Franklin Roosevelt took office in the midst of the Great Depression, bank robber Dillinger (Depp) and his crew of outlaws emerge as infamous thieves, brazenly stealing money from banks and being considered [[AntiHero antiheroes]] by much of the disgruntled public.

* InstantDeathBullet: It's averted.
** First is Baby Face Nelson's death: Purvis fires a single shot with his pistol and another agent, Madala, fires a shotgun at the same time. Both bullets hit Nelson in the chest. He falls over, but gets back up on his knees and manages to fire a wild burst with his submachine gun despite being badly wounded and more bullets entering his body. Purvis fires at least twelve more rounds with his pistol before Nelson dies permanently (which is in line with actual police training: continue to shoot the target until it falls).
*** In real life, Nelson lasted much longer after being shot. In his real shootout on November 27, 1934 in Barrington, Illinois against Agents Samuel P. Cowley and Herman Hollis (both of whom he mortally wounded), Nelson refused to fall despite having been struck a total of seventeen times (Hollis shot him ten times in his legs with a shotgun, and Cowley shot him seven times with a submachine gun). This is attributed to adrenaline surging through his body - which kept Nelson alive for approximately three hours before he succumbed to his wounds. And the bullets that felled Cowley and Hollis were fired after Nelson had been really shot up.
** Dillinger is shown living long enough to whisper something to Winstead after he is shot, before he dies. In the actual death, many reported that a few minutes passed between when Dillinger was shot and when he took his last breath.
** Played straight with Homer Van Meter, who is raked up with a submachine gun and dies instantly. The number of bullets entering his body might have something to do with this.

* AbilityOverAppearance: Melvin Purvis was known as "Little Mel" due to his 5'4 height, while Christian Bale is 6'0 tall.

* ArtisticLicenseHistory: Though the film is arguably one of the more accurate adaptations of this period, it still takes some liberties.

* HollywoodHistory: For a movie directly based on a non-fiction book, they twist around events and people quite a bit, or cut things out.
** A minor point is that Dillinger dies after Pretty Boy Floyd, Homer Van Meter, and Baby Face Nelson in the film, whereas in RealLife he died before any of those three: Van Meter was shot to death by police in St. Paul in late August. Floyd was gunned down October 22, 1934 in East Liverpool, Ohio; and Nelson died in a shootout on November 27, 1934 in Barrington, Illinois that also led to the deaths of Samuel P. Cowley and Herman Hollis.
** Floyd, rather than being killed by Purvis with a sniper rifle, was fatally injured by a volley of gunfire from a posse consisting of both FBI agents and local police. Purvis was present and nominally in charge of the lawmen, but doesn't appear to have fired his weapon. Floyd was also allegedly shot by one of Purvis's agents after being disarmed, though this is a more controversial account given by a local police officer, which was disputed by other witnesses.
** [[HistoricalHeroUpgrade The Feds were actually worse in reality than they were in the movie]], while Purvis himself was perhaps a bit ''better'' here than he was in real life. In this film, Purvis shoots down Nelson, Floyd, and Van Meter, when in reality, the former two were killed in shootings that happened without Purvis present[[note]]In Floyd's case, Purvis was present but wasn't one of those who shot him[[/note]], and Van Meter was killed by St. Paul police.[[note]]The account that Mann seems to use for Floyd's death is the FBI account, which states that Floyd was shot by a sniper from a great distance (although the real shooting happened on an open field, not in an apple orchard). Here, the film gives that role to Purvis. The film also uses the real Purvis's claim that he kicked a pistol out of Floyd's hand.[[/note]]
** While Dillinger did orchestrate the September 26, 1933 breakout of his future accomplices from the Indiana State Penitentiary, he did not participate in the breakout because he was locked up in Lima, Ohio awaiting trial for a bank robbery he committed in Bluffton, Ohio. He had someone else smuggle the guns in, the men broke themselves out, then they robbed a bank before traveling to Lima to free Dillinger. Dillinger also wasn't a household name at the time, only becoming this after he was broken out.
*** More problematic is that John "Red" Hamilton is shown out of jail and helps Dillinger with the TrojanPrisoner breakout. When in reality, he was actually one of the escapees, and the only one of them who never got recaptured before his death in April of 1934.
*** The real breakout did not have any of the bloodshed shown in the movie. There was no shootout, no deaths. All that did happen was that the prisoners used the guns to take the guards hostage, and had the guards lead them so as to give the impression to everyone else that nothing was wrong.
** Billie Frechette's arrest is shown happening after the shootout at Little Bohemia Lodge. In reality, the two events were reversed. In fact, the whole reason the Dillinger gang were at Little Bohemia was that the other members of the gang thought Dillinger could use the vacation to take his mind off Billie's legal troubles.
** Little Bohemia is shown as being used by the gang as a hideout after a disastrous bank robbery in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. The two events actually happened about a month and a half apart, and the movie completely skips over the things that happened in the interim: they robbed a bank in Mason City, Iowa a week after the Sioux Falls robbery. At the end of the month, Dillinger, Billie and Van Meter got into a shootout with police in St. Paul. Shortly after this, Dillinger and Billie made a visit to his family in Moorsville, and it was after this that Billie was arrested. Then the gang made a visit to Hamilton's sister Anna Steve before going to Little Bohemia.
** Purvis and his men are pursuing Dillinger in the first half of the film. During the fall of 1933, the FBI had no involvement in the Dillinger manhunt. The most they did was attend a number of conferences and offer to help the Indiana State Police in fingerprinting; following the death of Lima, Ohio's sheriff during the liberation of Dillinger from that jail, Hoover actually ignored pleas from Indiana Governor Paul [=McNutt=] for the FBI's help. So in this time period, responsibility for pursuing the Dillinger gang fell to the Indiana State Police.
*** Hoover announces to reporters Purvis's assignment to the Chicago field office, saying "his task will be to get Public Enemy #1, John Dillinger." This is a scene happening in late 1933 - Dillinger wasn't named Public Enemy No. 1 until his 31st birthday on June 22, 1934.
*** Additionally, Purvis had been SAC of the Chicago field office for several months when Dillinger first began robbing banks.
** A botched attempt to arrest a criminal happens at the Sherone Apartments building on November 1, 1933. In the film, the criminal who escapes is Baby Face Nelson with Tommy Carroll. In reality, the FBI were attempting to capture Verne Miller, who was wanted as one of the suspected conspirators in the Kansas City Massacre in June 1933, happened at this apartment building on November 1, 1933.
** The Sioux Falls robbery.
*** Nelson gunning a motorcycle cop through a window with a submachine gun, then cackling, "I GOT ONE!" is true, according to FBI files. However, the robbery appears to be a composite of the Sioux Falls robbery and two of Dillinger's bank robberies that followed later in 1934:
*** Dillinger gets shot in the shoulder, which actually happened a week after the Sioux Falls robbery, when the gang robbed the First National Bank in Mason City, Iowa. Also taken from the actual Mason City robbery is the gang getting less than they were expecting. When told about the job by Tommy Carroll, Dillinger is told that the bank they'll hit may net them six figures. In the real Sioux Falls robbery, the gang only netted $46,000 (which is how much they count in the film). Them expecting more money than they really got went to Mason City - they knew there was about $250,000 in that bank's vault, but they netted only about 1/5th of that much as a result of Hamilton being stalled by an intelligent bank manager.
*** During the shootout, a bit happens where a boy jumps on Nelson's back and struggles with him for a few moments before Nelson throws him backwards into a storefront window. Such an incident did happen with Nelson, but it was actually during Dillinger's last bank robbery, of the Merchants National Bank in South Bend, Indiana on June 30, 1934.
** George "Baby Face" Nelson is depicted as LargeAndInCharge, common in depictions of him. He was actually TheNapoleon, hence his nickname (which he personally hated), given to him after he robbed the wife of Chicago mayor William Hale Thompson, due to his short stature and youthful looks. He also died at age 25.

*** However, it is worth noting that the real Tommy Carroll was never tortured for information. He really died on June 7, when he was shot by a Waterloo police detective acting on a filling station attendant's tip about a "tough customer". In fact, a different Dillinger gang member, Eddie Green, received the gunshot wound that Carroll receives in the movie (bullet entering the back of his head and coming to a rest above the right eye) when he was ambushed by police in St. Paul in early April.
** And then we see Harold Reinecke giving Billie Frechette the third degree.
*** Although it is TruthInTelevision that the FBI may have used the "third degree" interrogation method on a few prisoners, Billie Frechette PROBABLY was not one of them. However, there were two other prisoners, Dick Galatas (wanted for his role in the Kansas City Massacre conspiracy) and Dock Barker, who allegedly got the third degree. The fact that Billie gives a false address under torture is meant to show that torture almost never works because the person being subjected to it will say whatever they think the torturer wants to hear to get them to stop.

* MoreDakka: Everybody's got submachine guns, and boy do they use them (killing surprisingly few people in the process).

* RedRightHand: The real Hamilton lost two fingers on his right hand in a childhood sledding accident. Part of another finger on that hand was shot off in a bank robbery in East Chicago in January 1934. However, CGI was not used in the film, so Creator/JasonClarke has all ten digits on when his character only had seven.

* ShownTheirWork: Dillinger's death scene, right down to the location and the path of the bullets that kill him, specifically, the fatal bullet - fired by Winstead from close range. It entered Dillinger through the back of his head, severed his spinal cord, tore through his brain, and exited out the front of his forehead above his right eye. They even redressed a few blocks of street to recreate the 1934 atmosphere of the Biograph. A different theater was used to represent the Biograph's interior, however. And yes, the movie Johnny Depp is shown watching is actually ''Film/ManhattanMelodrama'', the real film that the real Dillinger watched before he walked out of the theater and was gunned down.

** Based on a comparison between film dialogue and material mentioned in Bryan Borrough's book, there is a good amount of dialogue that was taken from the book or from the FBI files.
*** However, the dialogue is not always consistent with when it actually happened: in the Racine bank robbery (the first one, and the only one we see in full (as we only see the start of the second robbery and join the third robbery midway through its execution)), Dillinger says to the bank manager, "You can be a dead hero or a live coward," after PistolWhipping him. The police files show that Dillinger actually said it during the escape from Crown Point.

* SteelEarDrums: Played straight in that the bank manager taken hostage in the first bank robbery doesn't even flinch despite a Thompson submachine gun and a BAR being fired simultaneously just feet from his head.

* TheSyndicate: [[TropeNamer Obviously]]. Frank Nitti's reluctance to help Dillinger is accurate, too. This contrasted him from UsefulNotes/AlCapone, who was known to provide protection to bank robbers and outlaws. Both the real Dillinger gang and the Barker-Karpis gang both were wary of who they established contact with because they knew that the heat brought on by the crimes they committed and their respective police manhunts could also risk a chance of causing police investigation into Syndicate activities.
* ThereIsNoKillLikeOverkill: Averted with Dillinger, who is hit four times with bullets from three semi-automatic pistols at close range, which is accurate. Played straight, though, when Purvis guns down Van Meter and Nelson in the field after the Little Bohemia shootout. Van Meter gets hit at least twenty or more times, raked up with submachine fire. Nelson gets one shotgun pellet and at least twelve bullets from Purvis's pistol.
** Purvis continuing to shoot Nelson until Nelson drops dead is an actual police tactic - American police procedure dictates that the officer fire at the target repeatedly until the target falls, rather than fire one or two hits and let blood loss take over.

** Nelson's actual death averted having an InstantDeathBullet scenario - he died three hours after being shot ten times in his legs with shotgun pellets and seven times in his torso and abdomen with a machine gun.

** Though not seen in the film, there were similar incidents involving Nelson in the next two bank robberies that he pulled with Dillinger - the March 13th robbery of the First National Bank in Mason City, Iowa; his escape from Little Bohemia after killing Agent Baum; and the June 30th robbery of the Merchants National Bank in South Bend, Indiana.
*** Baum's real death could have been a KarmicDeath - he was responsible for firing at the innocent civilians' car at Little Bohemia, leading to the gang's escape. He and another agent, Jay Newman, were checking on a suspicious car report at the house of nearby switchboard operator Alvin Koerner, where Nelson ambushed them. Newman was shot in the head, and wounded, while Baum was shot three times in the neck, and killed. A constable riding with them was also shot and wounded.

* WhatHappenedToTheMouse: Herbert Youngblood, the black inmate who assists Dillinger in his escape from Crown Point, is never seen again after they are shown driving through the open fields. He is never mentioned again, so the conclusion of his story is explained from a number of other books on Dillinger.[[labelnote:To elaborate]] Youngblood ended up in Huron, Michigan. Two weeks later, he caused a disturbance at a downtown store. Police responded. Reportedly, Youngblood managed to kill one police officer and wound another before being shot seven times. He died a few days after that. There were some racial tensions and allegations that a white man present at the scene may have been responsible for some of the shootings.[[/labelnote]]
** Likewise, we never see Pierpont and Makley after they and Dillinger are seen being arrested. In fact, no mention is made about them. [[labelnote:What happened in real life]]After being arrested, Pierpont, Makley and Russell Clark were packed off to stand trial in Lima, Ohio for the murder of Sheriff Jess Sarber. When put on trial in mid-March 1934 (around the time of Dillinger's escape and his Sioux Falls and Mason City robberies), they were all convicted. Pierpont and Makley were given the death penalty. They attempted to escape death row on September 22, 1934, two months after Dillinger's death, using fake guns carved from soap cakes and painted black with shoe polish. The attempt failed: Makley was killed and Pierpont was executed weeks later.[[/labelnote]]

* WouldHitAGirl: Harold Reinecke has a brutal interrogation of Billie Frechette. The real Dillinger reportedly almost considered assassinating him when rumors came out that something like this had happened.
* YouMustBeCold: Dillinger does this twice: once to a hostage bank teller and once to Billie. Both times, he hands these girls coats. All of it is TruthInTelevision as this was considered one of Dillinger's more renowned trademarks. It helps contrast him from Baby Face Nelson (see the Sioux Falls robbery).

* AluminumChristmasTrees: During the Racine bank robbery, Dillinger, having noticed a customer put his cash on the counter, tells him "Put it away. I'm not here for your money, I'm here for the bank's money." While it makes a nice ShoutOut to ''Film/{{Heat}}'' (also produced by Creator/MichaelMann), John Dillinger is reported to have said that to a customer while robbing the First National Bank in East Chicago, Indiana, while some sources attribute it to a bank robbery in Greencastle, Indiana.

* MoralDissonance: Torture and the third degree are shown as interrogation tactics used by some of Purvis's agents.