DILLINGER 1973
Written and directed by John Milius. With Warren Oates, Ben Johnson, Cloris Leachman, and Harry Dean Stanton.
Certain moments from movies stick in your head. Like Warren Oates mustering for roll call as a private security guard in Chandler. Strother Martin saying, “I’ll get it, Liberty,” and being kicked by John Wayne in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Slim Pickens riding Marlon Brando in One-Eyed Jacks. M. Emmet Walsh, handcuffed high up on the chain-link fence beside the free way, his pants pulled down, in Straight Time.
One of those images for me is Harry Dean Stanton in a raccoon skin coat, being shot by farmers in Dillinger. Boola boola.
In real life, the character played by Stanton was shot by the police, in an alley, in Dayton, Ohio, or somewhere like that. But the image remains, of all those Depression-era farmers, venting their frustration on anybody with the temerity to rob banks, and then present himself as a target, to a mob, a lynch mob, or shooting mob, as case may be. Hubris is punished by the gods.
Do you notice how many of those remembered people are character actors, rather than leading men, and how many of the pictures were low-budget, not top-drawer films?
I wouldn’t miss a movie with Warren Oates in it, or Harry Dean Stanton, or Ben Johnson, or M. Emmet Walsh – and they take whatever work comes their way.
Pictures like Dillinger, produced by Samuel Arkoff’s American-International.
If it wasn’t for Samuel Arkoff and Roger Corman, many an actor or director or writer wouldn’t have had a chance to develop his or her craft, and the drive-ins and video stores would be much the poorer for it. You learn to do big-budget pictures by doing low-budget ones.
