'Public Enemies' No. 1 (in historical accuracy, writer says)

Hollywood makes myths and always has, and I guess that's as it should be. Moviegoers want to be entertained, after all, so moviemakers have long burnished history to make it more entertaining. From "Birth of a Nation" all the way up to "Mississippi Burning," "The Untouchables" and the little-remembered CIA-in-Laos film "Air America," the facts of American 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 step forward these days to argue that there was really 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 some sense where the lines between history and myth are drawn. This year's big July 4 movie, "Public Enemies," starring Johnny Depp, Christian Bale and Marion Cotillard, is just the latest film that will probably raise such questions.

The movie, directed by Michael Mann, maker of such memorable films as "Heat," "Collateral" and "Last of the Mohicans," 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 -- those of Bonnie and Clyde, Baby Face Nelson, Machine Gun Kelly and Pretty Boy Floyd, among others -- Mann has chosen to focus on the most successful of this group, Indiana-born John Dillinger, whose crime spree during 1933 and 1934 held not just the nation but much of the Western world in thrall. Depp plays Dillinger and Bale his nemesis, the FBI agent who zealously 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 last 75 years, in part, I suspect, because he never earned a memorable nickname or spawned an Academy Award-winning movie.

Born in 1903, Dillinger was the classic nobody from nowhere, a terrible student 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 outside Indianapolis one fateful night in 1924 when a character from the local pool hall lured him into the drunken mugging of their grocer. A judge threw the book at poor Dillinger, who ended up doing nine years of hard prison time, mostly at the Indiana State Penitentiary in Michigan City.