Hollywood makes myths and always has, and I guess that's as it should be. Moviegoers want to be entertained, after all, so filmmakers have long burnished history to make it more entertaining.
From Birth of a Nation to Mississippi Burning, The Untouchables and the CIA-in-Laos film Air America, the facts of US history have marched off to battle with Hollywood myth and, sadly, at least for me, lost almost every time.
Only the stodgiest Ivy League historian will argue that there was no smooth-talking Mr Anderson who outfoxed the Mississippi Ku Klux Klan in the 1960s.
But there is something to be said for trying to give audiences a sense where the lines between history and myth are drawn. Public Enemies, starring Johnny Depp, Christian Bale and Marion Cotillard, is the latest film that will probably raise such questions.
Directed by Michael Mann, maker of Heat, Collateral and Last of the Mohicans, it is based on a book I wrote several years back; the movie, however, is all Mann's.
While the book tells the intertwined stories of all the major Depression-era bank robbery gangs - Bonnie and Clyde, Baby Face Nelson, Machine Gun Kelly and Pretty Boy Floyd, among others - Mann focuses on the most successful of them, Indiana-born John Dillinger, whose 1933 and 1934 crime spree held much of the Western world in thrall.
Depp plays Dillinger and Bale his nemesis, the FBI agent who pursued him, Melvin Purvis.
Though during his life his notoriety dwarfed that of lesser peers such as Bonnie and Clyde, Dillinger's fame has dimmed over the past 75 years, in part, I suspect, because he never earned a memorable nickname or spawned an Oscar-winning movie.
Born in 1903, Dillinger was the classic nobody from nowhere, with an abusive father who found himself at loose ends in his early 20s. He tried the Navy, but went AWOL, then marriage, which didn't take. He was bumming around his hometown one night in 1924 when a character lured him into mugging their grocer.
Dillinger did nine years of hard time, mostly at the Indiana State Penitentiary. There he fell in with a group of bank robbers, who before his parole in May 1933, taught him how to rob a bank, gave him a list of targets and begged him to use the proceeds to break them out. Which he did the next September.
For the following 10 months Dillinger and his new gang, later to include Baby Face Nelson, embarked on a series of outrageous criminal adventures that has seldom been matched.
He was arrested twice and staged two escapes, followed by two shoot-outs with the FBI, including what is the most dramatic gunfight in the Bureau's history, the battle at Little Bohemia, where Dillinger escaped despite being encircled by two dozen agents.
What elevated Dillinger above the ranks of ordinary robbers was not just his derring-do, but the way regular Americans cheered him on. This was the nadir of the Depression, a time when people were angry at the banks they felt had robbed them of their homes.
In Dillinger Midwesterners saw a charming farm boy who was doing what they couldn't - retaliating against the banks.
Public Enemies marks at least the fourth time Dillinger's story has been told in a film. The most memorable portrayal was probably the Warren Oates' version in John Milius' 1973 film Dillinger.
Dillinger was the highlight of a string of Depression-era crime films spawned by the success of 1967's Bonnie and Clyde, the movie that persuaded Americans that a pair of white-trash spree killers from the slums of Dallas, were actually glamorous, caring, misunderstood young rebels.
A great film, but the real Bonnie and Clyde were nothing like Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway. They were stupid kids who drove around the Midwest, robbing things when they ran out of money and murdering anyone who tried to stop them. They weren't even well known outside Texas. The only time they made the front page of the New York Times was the day after they died.
The most vivid, and wrongheaded, of these films may have been Roger Corman's 1970 Bloody Mama, which had Shelley Winters as the grandmotherly Ma Barker, the supposed brains of the Barker-Karpis gang. FBI files show Ma Barker was never even a criminal, much less a mastermind.
Movies about the Depression-era marauders have been made since the 1970s, though none is memorable. Ma Barker was portrayed by Theresa Russell in a 1996 movie. Even Baby Face got his own movie; he was played by C Thomas Howell. A better Nelson, played by Richard Dreyfuss, stood alongside Warren Oates' Dillinger. Nelson was a chattering bore, and Dreyfuss nailed him as such.
Oates was too tough and too old to play his role. He played a mean Dillinger who was portrayed as a kind of Depression-era Malibu Barbie by Michelle Phillips of the Mamas & the Papas.
The real Dillinger, unlike Nelson, was never the indiscriminate killer Oates seemed to be. He shot and killed exactly one man, a detective who fired on him outside a bank.
There are those, I wager, who'll say Depp is too polite or too smooth to portray Dillinger. In fact, those were the very qualities that made the real Dillinger so appealing.
Public Enemies is the most historically accurate Dillinger and Mann is a stickler for historical accuracy. There is fictionalisation here, but it's Hollywood; otherwise you'd call it a documentary.
Mann not only shot at the actual scene of Dillinger's greatest jailbreak, the lockup in Crown Point, Indiana, but at the actual scene of his great shoot-out, at the Little Bohemia lodge.
I was an extra in that scene, as a reporter rushing towards Dillinger-Depp as he was shot. Up and down the street, storefronts had been transformed to appear as they had that night 75 years before.
Yes, I know it's just a movie and most won't care that the details are historically accurate, but I can remember looking around and smiling, happy that, in this case , Hollywood was getting it right.
Burrough, a special correspondent at Vanity Fair, is author of Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34.
Public Enemies opens in South Africa on Friday, September 4.
Be the first to watch Public Enemies UIP are offering some lucky readers the chance to be the first to watch Michael Mann's latest film, Public Enemies. UIP will host a free screening of the film on Sunday at 5.30pm at the following Nu Metro cinemas:
Hyde Park, Johannesburg; Menlyn Park, Pretoria; the V&A Waterfront, Cape Town and the Pavilion in Durban.
Tickets are available from 1pm today on a first come, first served basis and each reader can collect a double ticket from the box office at the relevant cinema.
Independent Newspapers subscribes to the South African Press Code that prescribes news that is truthful, accurate, fair and balanced. If we don't live up to the Code please contact the Press Ombudsman at 011 484 3612/8
