Dillinger | |
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Theatrical release poster
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Directed by | Max Nosseck |
Produced by | Frank and Maurice King |
Written by |
William Castle (uncredited) Philip Yordan |
Starring |
Lawrence Tierney Edmund Lowe Anne Jeffreys Elisha Cook Jr. Eduardo Ciannelli |
Music by | Dimitri Tiomkin |
Cinematography | Jackson Rose |
Production
company |
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Release date
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Running time
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70 minutes |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Budget | $150,000 or $65,000 |
Box office | $2 million or $4 million |
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 is generally regarded as not being film noir. Some sequences were shot at Big Bear Lake, California.
Philip Yordan was nominated for the Academy Award for Writing Original Screenplay, earning Monogram Pictures its first Oscar nomination for a feature-length film release.
The story begins with a newsreel summing up the gangster life of John Dillinger in detail. At the end of the newsreel, Dillinger's father (Victor Kilian) walks onto the stage and speaks to the movie audience about his son's childhood back in Indiana. He talks of John’s childhood as having been ordinary and not very eventful, but concedes that his son had ambitions and wanted to go his own way. The young Dillinger left his childhood town to find his fortune in Indianapolis, but soon ran out of money. The scene fades to a restaurant, where John (Tierney) is on a date and finds himself humiliated by the waiter who refuses to accept a check for the meal; unable to pay for the meal, he 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.