Arrow Blu-ray Film Review

Dillinger (1973) • Blu-ray [Arrow Video]

In Depression-era America, a federal agent hunts the legendary bank robber John Dillinger and his gang.

Gangsters and bank robbers were big news in the 1930s, but for most of that decade and the ones that followed the Hays Code largely excluded them from the screen precisely because of their potential to become folk heroes. Indeed, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America — which administered the code — inserted specific strictures against portraying “activities of American gangsters”, the depiction of illegal weapons, and scenes of law enforcement officers being killed.

These prohibitions were starting to be ignored by the 1950s, but it was not until the end of the 1960s (at which point the Code also formally ended) that the modern American gangster movie really got into full swing, and both historic and contemporary criminals became familiar as antiheroes.

Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967) is the best-known of those films set in the past, but there were plenty of others: Martin Scorsese’s Boxcar…