Yet another low-budget Roger Corman crime drama exploiting legendary criminal figures, DILLINGER AND CAPONE contrives the fanciful team-up of the famed bank robber and the retired Capone in a caper involving the Mob kingpin's secret money stash.
After watching as his brother is killed instead of him, bank robber John Dillinger (Martin Sheen) goes into hiding in California under the name of John Dalton. In 1940 he is summoned by onetime Chicago Mob boss Al Capone (F. Murray Abraham), newly released from a federal prison and retired to
Florida. Holding Dillinger's wife Abigail (Catherine Hicks) and son Sam (Michael Oliver) hostage, Capone persuades Dillinger to return to Chicago to retrieve $15 million in cash hidden in a hotel basement now unwittingly occupied by Capone's Mob rival, Lou Gazzo (Anthony Crivello). Accompanied by
Capone's English butler, Cecil (Stephen Davies), Dillinger arrives in Chicago and enlists the help of his former robbery partner George (Don Stroud) and George's nephew Billy (Sasha Jenson). After knocking out the building's electricity, Dillinger and crew enter the hotel posing as repairmen and
gain access to the basement on the pretext of restoring power. To recover the money, they must drill through a wall to a secret room. The caper unfolds as planned until George is killed and Billy wounded in a machine gun battle with Gazzo and his men.
At their church hideout, Dillinger and Billy divide up their share of the money, Cecil having departed on his own, but are interrupted by two ex-federal agents, Gilroy (Jeffrey Combs) and Frank (Michael C. Gwynne), who have had them under surveillance. In the ensuing fight, Billy and Frank are
killed, the money is burnt, and Dillinger flees. Back in Florida, Dillinger saves his wife and son from a deranged, syphillitic Capone, calming him by pretending to be Cecil, and escapes with his family.
Producer Roger Corman's long attraction to Depression-era crime figures, from MACHINE GUN KELLY (1958) to BIG BAD MAMA II (1987), has spiraled downward to a new low with DILLINGER AND CAPONE, which takes bold dramatic license to exploit both Geraldo Rivera's live TV opening of Capone's empty
vaults and a widely-disputed theory that a double for Dillinger was killed by the feds, as elaborated in the book Dillinger is Dead by crime historian (and cocreator of The Motion Picture Guide) Jay Robert Nash. However, the film's intriguing pairing of the leading figures from the two poles of
Depression-era crime--small town banditry and big city rackets--is so mishandled that it pales next to the sound dramatic sense and keen commercial instincts of such earlier, well-remembered combinations as FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLF MAN and BILLY THE KID VS. DRACULA.
Shot on a handful of elegant if claustrophobic location interiors, the film never achieves the intensity or keen insight into power and violence which previously distinguished Corman's own directorial efforts in this genre. Abraham shamelessly overacts as the unstable, megalomaniacal, Capone while
Sheen (looking here more like Jack Palance than Dillinger) walks through his part rather too good-naturedly. Of the rest of the cast, only genre regulars Jeffrey Combs, as an overzealous ex-fed, and Don Stroud, as Dillinger's onetime partner, lend some dramatic weight to the proceedings.
(Violence.) leave a comment
