If the Western remains the primary repository of 19th-century American values, with the cowboy as its appropriate hero, the gangster film reflects many of the dominant realities of the 20th century, and its protagonist the symbolic figure of his time. From "Little Caesar" to "The Sopranos" the notion of organized crime not only continues to attract filmmakers and audiences, but also provides some of the most significant insights into contemporary history and culture: the "Godfather" series remains one of the great American documents.

The gangster film flourished in the golden age of its subject, the 1930's, when such historical events as an enormous wave of immigration, Prohibition, the collapse of the stock market, and the Great Depression itself created a propitious environment for the careers of some spectacular criminals. Newspapers lionized Al Capone, who ran Chicago, the capital city of crime, and made ambiguous heroes of such independent, mostly rural entrepreneurs as Bonnie and Clyde, Ma Barker, Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd, and most charismatic of them all, the handsome, debonair John Dillinger.

Michael Mann's "Public Enemies" retells the familiar story of Dillinger's bank robberies, shootouts with police, and daring prison escapes, which captured the popular imagination in the early 1930's, while also showing the corresponding rise of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI as a national investigative force. Those parallel plots meet in the historic conflict between Dillinger (Johnny Depp) and one of Hoover's top agents, Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale), ending with the most memorable assassination of a criminal in American history, the FBI's shooting of Dillinger as he left a Chicago theater showing - what else? - a gangster movie, "Manhattan Melodrama."

Although constrained by history, the director also turns Dillinger's criminal saga into a love story, violating the conventions of a form that frequently shows its protagonist as a man who disdains the mere pleasures of the flesh for the higher and purer pursuit of an abstraction, sheer power. Dillinger not only enjoys the normal rewards of robbing banks - fine clothes, big cars, glamorous nightclubs, flashy women - but actually falls in love with Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard), who works at the classic gangster girlfriend job of coat check girl. That love affair motivates much of Dillinger's efforts to elude capture and his plans for the inevitable goal of all his kind, the Last Big Score; it also adds a strong emotional dimension to the familiar parabola of the criminal career.

"Public Enemies" faithfully reproduces the time of its action, recreating in convincing detail both the appearance and the spirit of the 1930's; the clothes, the cars, the movies, the music conform to the conventions of the genre, but also reflect the popular culture of a time when newspapers, magazines, newsreels, fictional cinema combined to inform the whole country of the activities of its greatest celebrities: baseball players, motion picture stars, and, yes, gangsters. As the film shows, those burgeoning media made John Dillinger something of a hero, a charming rogue who embodied American individualism and independence, practiced a code of loyalty to his gang, and targeted one of the true villains of the Depression, the grand temples of finance. When the police capture him, people line the streets to wave at the prisoner, acknowledging him as a figure of wish fulfillment who attacked the forces of wealth and for a while at least, lived a life of excitement, freedom, and pleasure, scarce commodities in a dark time.

Beneath the surface of the film, a number of stories remain untold, a number of pictures only glimpsed. The director never shows Dillinger's famous letter to Henry Ford, acknowledging the superiority of the new V-8 engine that enabled him to outrun the law - the gangsters always enjoyed technological superiority to law enforcement.

Except for a brief prose coda, Mann never even hints at whatever caused the obsessed Melvin Purvis to resign from the FBI a year after killing Dillinger and later, to commit suicide. Of course, we all know what happened to J. Edgar Hoover, whose bureau became a national investigative force with enormous resources (yet unable to catch a cold on a wet night), the voyeur-in-chief to the nation, and a man who delighted in a wardrobe of dresses that would arouse the envy of Rudy Giuliani.

Public Enemies

(R), directed by Michael Mann

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