Warren Oates played the titular bank robber in John Milius’s 1973 thriller, Dillinger – a surprisingly relevant film about fame and financial desperation. He wasn’t the first actor to play the infamous Depression-era bank robber John Dillinger, but Warren Oates undoubtedly gives the most charismatic portrayal seen to date. Oily, vain, and almost absurdly self-confident, ... Dillinger | What an old film about an even older bank robber can tell us about the 21st century
Warren Oates played the titular bank robber in John Milius’s 1973 thriller, Dillinger – a surprisingly relevant film about fame and financial desperation.
He wasn’t the first actor to play the infamous Depression-era bank robber John Dillinger, but Warren Oates undoubtedly gives the most charismatic portrayal seen to date. Oily, vain, and almost absurdly self-confident, he dominates every scene in writer-director John Milius’ 1973 thriller.
From its fourth-wall breaking opening shot, which casts the viewer as a bank clerk staring down the barrel of Dillinger’s gun, Milius establishes the underlying theme: this isn’t a film about cops and robbers so much as public image.
“These few dollars you lose here today are going to buy you stories to tell your children and great-grandchildren,” Dillinger drawls grandly to both us and the people cowering in the bank. “This could be one of the big moments in your life. Don’t make it your last.”
In its depiction of outlaws terrorising 1930s America, Dillinger is clearly cut from the same cloth as 1967’s Bonnie And Clyde, which pushed new boundaries in what could be shown in an American movie. Certainly, critics at the time noted the similarities between the two films, and several dismissed Dillinger as a pale imitation of Arthur Penn’s seminal crime drama.
Certainly, Dillinger echoes Penn’s film in its blackly comic tone, bracing violence and its characters’ courting of media attention. But where Dillinger differs is in its sympathies. Where Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway brought Hollywood good looks to robbers Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, and the film as a whole depicts them as the height of anti-establishment cool. Milius does the opposite.
Dillinger and his gang are fascinating characters, certainly – a captivating rabble played by, to name a few, Geoffrey Lewis, Harry Dean Stanton and a pre-fame Richard Dreyfuss – but Milius casts them as bullying, psychotic degenerates. Their robberies are accompanied by a quite shocking level of collateral damage, with Dillinger and his men seemingly oblivious to the number of innocent bystanders they manage to cut down during their escape attempts.
If Milius romanticises anyone, it’s FBI agent Melvin Purvis (Ben Johnson), whom he casts as a stoic sheriff from the Old West. With a cigar at the ready, Purvis calmly wades into dangerous situations as his younger compatriots stand on the side lines; one of his first bits of business is to storm a dilapidated house in which a hoodlum has taken a woman hostage.
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Like Dillinger, Purvis is aware that his movements are being covered in the newspapers. But unlike Dillinger, who pursues fame out of vanity, Purvis is engaged in a quiet appeal to the American public’s better angels. The Great Depression has torn America apart, socially and economically, and Milius depicts rural towns as sad, abandoned places akin to the apocalyptic backdrops of Spaghetti westerns. (“I ain’t crazy, Johnny,” robber Charles Mackley (John Ryan) gloomily intones. “There as a fat little bank here back in 25. The whole county was rich.”)
At the height of the economic collapse that engulfed the US in the early 1930s, unemployment at 25 percent, affecting some 13 million people; families and entire communities were penniless. In this climate, Dillinger and criminals like him began to be viewed as folk heroes.
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Purvis, on the other hand, is determined to stamp out the criminality and recast government agents as the good guys rather than the villains. He cheerfully adopts the ‘G-Man’ monicker applied to him by a terror-struck hoodlum, perhaps thinking it sounds a bit like a comic book hero. But as Purvis discovers in one standout scene, winning the public’s hearts and minds is an uphill battle; when he asks a little boy playing outside a courtroom what he wants to be when he grows up, the boy replies, ‘bank robber’. Purvis’ look of frustration and disappointment is priceless.
Famously a right-wing libertarian, Milius probably didn’t approve of the New Deal reforms introduced by Roosevelt’s administration later in the 1930s. But his political views aside, Milius’s depiction of a society in disarray feels as timely as it ever did. The early 20th century showed us how the Depression played a part in Hitler’s rise to power; in our own lifetimes, we’ve seen how recessions can create divisions and lead to the rise of new populist leaders and a seemingly inexorable drift towards fascism.
The aftershocks of the 2008 financial crisis and the 2020 pandemic are still being felt in 2026. If the current stock market exuberance surrounding the tech sector is interrupted by a crash, as some are predicting, then the aftermath will almost certainly result in more job losses, even further social turmoil, and the appearance of more opportunists seeking to capitalise on all the accompanying anger.
Dillinger is a brutal, sharply-written gangster thriller from Milius – harsher and more horrifying than the 1945 version, starring a young Lawrence Tierney in the title role. It’s also funnier and more economical than Michael Mann’s expensive, more ornate Public Enemies from 2009, in which Johnny Depp and Christian Bale played Dillinger and Purvis respectively. The dust and grinding poverty is far less palpable in Mann’s depiction of the 1930s.
But as well as an absorbing, even quotable thriller (Harry Dean Stanton’s refrain of “Things ain’t working out for me today,” are delivered with his inimitable matter-of-factness), Dillinger also functions as a warning. It’s a snapshot of what happens when the gap between rich and poor develops into a chasm. In a closing monologue, the words of FBI director J Edgar Hoover (played by actor Paul Frees) denounces John Dillinger as a “rat that the country may consider itself fortunate to be rid of.”
That may be true, but people like him – whether they’re bank robbers, right-wing populists, or manosphere influencers – are a symptom of a broader disease. The more inequality there is, the more Dillingers spring up.
Dillinger is available to stream on Prime Video now.
