Dillinger

Dillinger is a 1945 gangster film telling the story of John Dillinger. The film was directed by Max Nosseck. Dillinger was the first major film to star Lawrence Tierney. The B-movie was shot in black and white and features a smoke-bomb bank robbery edited into the film from the 1937 Fritz Lang film You Only Live Once. The film was released on DVD by Warner Bros. for the Film Noir Classic Collections 2 in 2005, even though the film generally is not regarded as being film noir. Some sequences were shot at Big Bear Lake, California. Plot summary A newsreel plays, summing up the gangster life of John Dillinger in detail. At the end of the newsreel, Dillinger's father walks onto the stage and speaks to the movie audience about his son's childhood back in Indiana, which he says was ordinary and not very eventful, but concedes that his son had ambitions and wanted to go his own way. The young Dillinger left his town to find his fortune in Indianapolis, but soon ran out of money. The scene fades to a restaurant, where John is on a date and finds himself humiliated by the waiter who refuses to accept a check for the meal; John excuses himself, runs into a nearby grocery store and robs it for $7.20 in cash. He makes the clerk at the store believe he has a gun in his hand under the jacket. John is soon arrested for this felony, and he is sentenced to prison. When incarcerated, he becomes good friends with Specs Green, his cell mate. Specs is an infamous bank robber whose gangMarco Minnelli, Doc Madison and Kirk Ottoare also in the same prison. John is impressed by Specs and his experience and intelligence, and begins to look up to him as a father figure.