Walter Winchell / Public Enemies

[Gordon Gates of The Blackboard runs a "noir birthdays" post most days; on April 7, Walter Winchell's name came up.]

Walter Winchell of course has significant noir connections, as the model for Burt Lancaster's J.J. Hunsecker in Sweet Smell of Success ("I love this dirty town!") and as the narrator for The Untouchables. His life was also the basis of the much earlier film Okay, America! (1932), with Lew Ayres (it should have been Lee Tracy, really). In 1933, in one of his many film appearances as himself, Winchell appeared in a Universal musical short with the extraordinarily apt title I Know Everybody and Everybody's Racket.

Speaking of The Untouchables, I'm currently reading Bryan Burrough's Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-1934, which is very well done, informative and entertaining. You probably know that a film version of this book, with Johnny Depp and Christian Bale and directed by Michael Mann, is scheduled to open later this year. Part of it was shot on location in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, just down the road from me; I almost auditioned to be an extra, but didn't have the time to commit. The film will probably be fun in its own right, but I understand that it's going to concentrate on the John Dillinger story and thus lose what is truly distinctive and valuable about the book, which is that Burrough cuts contrapuntally within a day-by-day, even hour-by-hour time-frame, between six leading gangs (which had connections and inter-relations): Dillinger, Barker-Karpis, Bonnie and Clyde, Machine Gun Kelly, Baby Face Nelson, and Pretty Boy Floyd. As Burrough says in his Author's Note, "these six story lines truly comprise a single narrative, the unifying element being the involvement of the FBI." Until reading this book, I had not realized that all those gangs had operated at their height within such a tight time period. It's a great, thrilling approach that Burrough takes, but probably too complex and un-commercial for most film-makers not named Robert Altman (for whom six story-lines would have been just another day at the office).