Public Enemies Movie Details
Public Enemies taglines:America’s Most Wanted
 Public Enemies DVD Cover |
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| Directors: Michael Mann | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| IMDB Rating: 7.2/10 out of 57,653 votes |
“Public Enemies” 2009 by Michael Mann – Movie Goofs
“Public Enemies” Plot Summary
The Feds try to take down notorious American gangsters John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson and Pretty Boy Floyd during a booming crime wave in the 1930s.
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“Public Enemies” Goofs List
- Factual errors: SPOILER: Agent Purvis and his men hunt down Baby Face Nelson, Van Meter, and a third man in a car chase. This ends with all three gangsters being shot dead. However, Van Meter & Nelson are actually killed after John Dillinger on separate occasions. Baby Face Nelson even took over as public enemy #1 upon Dillinger’s death.
- Anachronisms: In the main trailer for the film, the grill of the Dillinger getaway car is that of a 1936 Chevrolet. Dillinger died in a gun battle in 1934. Obviously, the ‘36 models of Chevrolet were not in production until late 1935.
- Anachronisms: Milwaukee streetcars were in orange and cream colors, not green as seen in the film.
- Continuity: In the scene where John Dillinger (Johnny Depp) is getting ready to leave for the Biograph Theatre, Dillinger checks his pocket watch. The time on the watch says 5:00. After a cut to a closer shot about a second later his watch says 6:30.
- Factual errors: In the film, Baby Face Nelson was killed in a shootout with agents in Wisconsin after the robbery of the Security National Bank at Sioux Falls, South Dakota. In fact, he was killed due to injury’s suffered in a shootout with FBI agents in “The Battle Of Barrington” in a northwest suburb of Chicago on November 27, 1934.
- Factual errors: In the opening sequence, Walter Dietrich is shown being killed in the Michigan City breakout on September 26, 1933. Dietrich was actually captured on January 6, 1934, and returned to the Indiana State Prison at Michigan City. Massive bloodshed is shown in the Michigan City sequence, when in fact only one man, a clerk, was wounded. Further, Dillinger was killed before Dietrich’s death.
- Anachronisms: In the scene in which Baby Face Nelson is drunk at the bar, he asks the other people there if they want to hear his ‘James Cagney (I)’ impersonations, saying Cagney’s famous line from Angels with Dirty Faces (1938) : “Whaddya hear, whaddya say.” However, the events of Public Enemies (2009) took place in the early 1930s, and Angels with Dirty Faces (1938) was not released until 1938.
- Continuity: When John Dillinger escapes from the jail the second time and he is driving the sheriff’s car he is sitting at a red light. To his right there are 3 armed military soldiers. In the following bird’s eye view it shows no one standing there. Finally, when the shot returns to Dillinger the 3 soldiers are still standing there.
- Factual errors: In the scene where John Dillinger is in the police station with officers listening to a baseball game on the radio, the game is the Chicago Cubs vs. NY Yankees. Since those teams only played in the World Series in late Sep to early Oct 1932 and Dillinger was in prison from 1924 until being paroled in May 1933, there is no way it could be the Cubs vs. Yankees on the radio. There was no interleague play back then except for the World Series and they never broadcast spring training games on the radio way back then.
- Factual errors: In the opening sequence, Dillinger appears at the Indiana State Prison at Michigan City and helps his pals in the escape. Dillinger was actually in the Montgomery County Jail in Dayton, Ohio, the day the escape occurred and transferred to Lima the following day.
- Revealing mistakes: In some close-up shots of his hands, Johnny Depp’s tattoos on his fingers are visible.
- Anachronisms: Dillinger turns on an early Zenith table top radio and the voice on the radio is immediately heard. Back in the 1930s, AM radios took five or six seconds to warm up when turned on before a voice or music could be heard.
- Factual errors: Pretty Boy Floyd, killed in the beginning of the movie by Purvis, was actually killed on October 22, 1934, exactly 3 months after Dillinger died.
- Anachronisms: Filtered cigarettes were not around in the 1930s.
- Anachronisms: The movie theater is showing a post-1934 “Looney Tunes” short (Porky Pig’s on the title card and his first cartoon, I Haven’t Got a Hat (1935), wasn’t released until after Dillinger’s death in 1935).
- Factual errors: In the film, Dillinger shown being wounded during the gang’s holdup of the Security National Bank of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, on March 6, 1934. In reality, he received a shoulder wound exactly one week later during the First National Bank of Mason City heist.
- Factual errors: Dillinger gang member John Hamilton, referred to as “Three Finger Jack” by the authorities, was missing two fingers on his right hand, and then lost yet a third finger of the same hand during the East Chicago bank job in January of ‘34. CGI wasn’t employed for this detail in the film. Thus, the actor playing Hamilton has all of his digits.
- Anachronisms: When Purvis is in the car outside Billie’s apartment looking at the transcription of the phone call between Billie and Dillinger, the transcript is in the Times New Roman font and looks like a computer printout, rather than a typewritten page as it should have been in the 1930s.
- Factual errors: Alvin Karpis is shown in the film recommending attorney Louis Piquett to Dillinger while in a nightclub. Crown Point trusty Sam Cahoon passed one of Piquett’s business cards to Dillinger while the famed outlaw was being jailed at Crown Point. The card getting into Cahoon’s hands first was arranged by the East Chicago mob.
- Revealing mistakes: A number of scenes depict newsreel cameramen operating hand cranked ‘pancake’ Akeley motion picture cameras that would have been used for recording silent film footage only. The actors are cranking these cameras way slower than would have been normal in such ‘news’ situations and would only have been cranked in this fashion to record high-speed, fast-paced special effects footage.
- Anachronisms: The steam engine used in the film was Milwaukee road 261. This locomotive used in the film was manufactured in 1944 by American Locomotive Works a decade after Dillinger’s time.
- Factual errors: Early in the film, soon after the Racine robbery, November 20, 1933, a radio announcer is heard referring to Dillinger as Public Enemy No. 1. Dillinger wasn’t named Public Enemy No. 1 until June 22, 1934, his 31st birthday.
- Factual errors: In the film, the three workers that come out of Little Bohemia Lodge get into a 1932 Chevy 4-door. It actually should be a 1933 Chevy coupe. The car the gang used for the Racine robbery in the film (with the blonde hostage) was a 1935 Buick 90. It should actually be a 1933 Buick 90.
- Factual errors: Dillinger is seen in the film opening his pocket watch, looking at Billie Frechette’s photo inside, then closing the watch and bringing it with him to the Biograph. The watch actually contained a photograph of Polly Hamilton.
- Factual errors: In the Crown Point jailbreak sequence, Dillinger is seen entering the gun safe and taking a .45, a Thompson submachine gun, and a BAR, Browning Automatic Rifle. Dillinger actually left the jail with a .45 and two Thompsons, one for him and one for Herbert Youngblood, the accused murderer at the jail who escaped with Dillinger.
- Continuity: During Dillinger’s phone conversation to Frechette after his second escape, he ends with “I love you.” In a following scene, the transcript of that conversation shows him ending with “I love you baby. I gotta go.”
- Revealing mistakes: In many Johnny Depp close-ups, you can see, on the left earlobe, his multiple piercings, which no 1933 American criminal would have had.
- Revealing mistakes: In the street scenes in which streetcar tracks are present, there are no suspended overhead wires. The overhead provided electricity to power the cars.
- Factual errors: In the film, J. Edgar Hoover is shown in front of a Senate subcommittee being excoriated for the Bureau’s performance. The incident takes place sometime between the 1933 start of the film and Dillinger’s death; in reality, the subcommittee hearing in which Senator McKellar publicly lashed out at Hoover didn’t occur until 1936, two years after Dillinger’s death.
- Anachronisms: A modern day electrical transformer can be seen on a telephone pole in the reflection of the window of the hotel in Tucson, Arizona.
- Anachronisms: While at the race track, the characters sit on molded green plastic seats which did not exist in the 1930s.
- Anachronisms: Throughout the movie many buildings are seen with double paned tempered glass and aluminum window frames. Most notably the FBI planning meeting across the street from the Biograph takes place in front of a large storefront with two large panes forming a corner joint with no framing. All windows of the period were single pane.
- Anachronisms: When Dillinger goes to the movie theater, a Porky Pig cartoon is on. Looney Tunes didn’t bring Porky to the screens until 1935.<
Download Public Enemies Related Movies
“Public Enemies” 2009 Trailer
‘Public Enemies – America’s Most Wanted
Public Enemies Movie Download Link
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