Public Enemies, a story about John Dillinger, recreates the 1930s admirably, but also takes a shot at recreating its movies. It’s a complicated love affair this film is spinning, because it’s trying to be true to the lives of its major characters, but it’s also working in the aspects of their lives that aren’t exactly real.
It’s a curious time and position to find yourself in really, and one in which reality was sort of up for grabs. Gangsters, movies, movies about gangsters, cars, machine guns, the FBI, and countless other things you heard about on the radio were all new ideas, and everyone was pretty much pretending they knew what the hell was going on.
Real gangsters and movie gangsters were equally creating themselves out of mythos and theory, and fed off a certain approval of the way the other looked.