John Dillinger used to be one of the touchstones of American culture. A one-man crime wave in the darkest year of the Great Depression, he robbed and escaped his way into the country’s heart, creating a myth of the solo gangster that persists to this day. If the Western hero – Wyatt Earp, Buffalo Bill, the fictitious Ethan Edwards – gave way in the last half of the 20^th century to the Sopranos and Corleones, it was Dillinger who led the way.

So hopes are high for Public Enemies, the new film about Dillinger and his G-man nemesis, Melvin Purvis, starring Johnny Depp and Christian Bale. The cast alone should sell the movie, these are both interesting actors who can bring bodies to the box office, and together there’s promise of real tension: cool vs. heat, expression vs. repression.

So why does it take the audience fully 20 minutes to feel some empathy for John Dillinger? We grew restless, waiting for a reason to like Johnny Depp. This should never happen. Instead the film starts with a prison break, and while it’s clear Dillinger has something to do with it we’re left wondering why this matters – we don’t know Dillinger at this point, a quarter hour into the movie or 75 years after his heyday. It’s a big risk to think we’ll care, implicitly. It doesn’t quite pay off.

Between his release from Indiana State Prison in May 1933 and his death a little over a year later, John Dillinger literally terrorized not the population but the banks of the Midwest. He was Public Enemy No. 1, the first so-named by the tense, ambitious, somewhat squirrelly (in Billy Crudup’s portrayal) J. Edgar Hoover. That his career precipitated the rise of a federal crime-fighting bureau (the nascent FBI) – with its enhanced interrogation techniques, domestic surveillance and shoot first, ask questions later ethos – gives us the irony of the movie’s title. Both criminal and police became enemies of the public good.

Preview of 1973’s “Dillinger,” with Warren Oates in the title role 

As directed by action impresario Michael Mann (Miami Vice, Heat, Ali and Hancock) the movie is filled with guns — the rattle of machine guns and the fiery blast of shotguns, the gunning of getaway cars and, the final spit of the handgun that kills John Dillinger. And in the sonic middle distance, the baleful blues of Billie Holliday (a bit of a stretch – her heyday came a few years later).

Depp grows on you, as does the character he plays – they all do, and the problem with the film might be how long it takes to get comfortable with them. It’s like a story told in reverse, and we identify with the actors too late. There’s no game of cards between cohorts at the outset to make us care who gets shot next, who else is sacrificed so Dillinger can pull off one more heist.

Even Christian Bale, recently so off-putting (behind the mask in The Dark Knight, overwhelmed by his destiny in Terminator: Salvation), becomes surprisingly sympathetic, if stoically so. There’s also a nice turn by Marion Cotillard as Billie Frechette, who masks her French accent with a nice Cajun-Florida lilt, or something like that: it’s hard to tell where she’s from, which adds to her appeal.

Ultimately, though, at well over 2 hours, Public Enemies fails to carry us into either the myth of Dillinger, or even its own storyline. Which is too bad, mostly because of the elevated role that John Dillinger has ably worn for 75 years. As well as the newspaper legends that grew around him in the 1930s, and the newsreels that created his first cinematic fame, in the 1970s he seemed to enjoy a revival in pop culture, even an unlikely appearance in psychedelic literature.

“John Dillinger, at the end, found a few seconds’ strange mercy in the movie images that hadn’t quite yet faded from his eyeballs—Clark Gable going off unregenerate to fry in the chair, voices gentle out of the deathrow steel so long Blackie…” evokes Thomas Pynchon in Gravity’s Rainbow (1973). And later, “… there was still for the doomed man some shift of personality in effect—the way you’ve felt for a little while afterward in the real muscles of your face and voice, that you were Gable, the ironic eyebrows, the shining, snakelike head…” This is a scene Mann labors over in the film’s concluding minutes, as if in attempting to visualize what is best expressed through literature.

Dillinger also shows up as some sort of Taoist sage in The Illuminati Trilogy, by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, who expresses a higher wisdom through his advice to victims during bank robberies: “Lie down on the floor and keep calm.”

But it’s in the movies that the most apt comparison can be made for Public Enemies, and here John Milius trumps Michael Mann’s preeing pretense in spades. Dillinger also came out in 1973, with oily, short-tempered Warren Oates in the title role and a much older Ben Johnson as his nemesis Melvin Purvis. The cast is a lot more entertaining all around, including Michelle Phillips (of the Mamas and Papas) as Billie Frechette, Cloris Leachman as the Lady in Red, and a young Richard Dreyfuss (just months before his breakout in American Graffiti) as hot-headed Baby Face Nelson. Need I emphasize that Oates puts Depp out to pasture? He swaggers and dominates, while Depp’s authority is more muted.

John Milius directed Dillinger as his first film. He’s not working much these days, but Milius was one of the last of the “real men” directors in the school of Budd Boetticher, Don Siegel and Sam Peckinpah. Milius had written the original script for what became Apocalypse Now, as well as Judge Roy Bean for Paul Newman and Jeremiah Johnson for Robert Redford. His own later films as director included The Wind and the Lion – to my mind, one of the great action romances ever made – Big Wednesday, Conan the Barbarian, and Red Dawn.

Aside from the Oates, and Milius’ no nonsense direction, it’s the script that makes Dillinger the better movie. Things make sense, they build, we care about the characters. Case in point: Puvis makes a point of telling us he’ll smoke a cigar over every crook he puts down, and he does so. When it’s time for him to point out Dillinger as he’s coming out of the Biograph Theater, the act makes contextual and narrative sense.

In Public Enemies, the gesture comes out of nowhere. I don’t even think Christian Bale smokes – he probably used an inhalation-double. And the “Lady in Red” who was notoriously known to have told the G-men she’d accompany Dillinger to the movie? She wears a white blouse and a red skirt. Where’s the visual impact in a skirt?

The N.Y. Times recently ran a long feature on the making of Public Enemies, and not a word is mentioned the 1973 movie. Now I know we live in the era of BMJ – Before Michael Jackson – but has our cultural memory become that short?

I guess my point is, if you’re going to make a movie of a myth, make it mythic, not a character study that runs in reverse. My bet is you’ll get more of  buzz out of the 2-minute trailer for Dillinger than the 2-hour 20-minute Public Enemies.