Trailer
Plot summary
John Dillinger leaves his Indiana hometown for Indianapolis to find his fortune, but his money runs out. At a restaurant a waiter will not take his check, so he walks into a grocery store and robs it of $7.20, making the clerk believe he has a gun under his jacket. The felony sends him to prison, where his cellmate is Specs Green, a bank robber serving time alongside his gang: Marco Minelli, Doc Madison and Kirk Otto. Dillinger, free much sooner than the others, looks up to Specs and offers to be the gang's man on the outside. Once released, he holds up a movie theater box office and flirts with the clerk, Helen Rogers.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Dillinger (1945)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The King Brothers advertised in the trade press for an unknown "Tough Guy to Play JOHN DILLINGER" because they thought audiences would not accept a familiar face; Lawrence Tierney, who by one account stole a script from their office on his first visit, was confirmed in the role a month later.
- Chicago banned the film, and on its opening day in New York police attended the screening to look for fugitives, though no arrests were made.
- The sister of the real John Dillinger, the bank robber the film is about, sued Monogram Pictures for $500,000 claiming emotional distress.
- The smoke-bomb bank robbery in this black-and-white B-movie was footage edited into it from Fritz Lang's 1937 film You Only Live Once.
- Philip Yordan's Oscar nomination for Writing Original Screenplay gave Monogram Pictures its first Oscar nomination for a feature-length film release.
- A wartime ban on exporting gangster films, especially to England, threatened the film's profits, so the budget was kept low and the cost-cutting shows in heavy reuse of footage from other films.
- The Hays Office, Warner Bros and Paramount asked that New York advertising for Dillinger referencing James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart and Alan Ladd remove those actors' names.
