Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI 1933-34

August is not a month for the lilly-livered, weak willed among us. The film director who brought us the likes of Miami Vice (2006), Michael Mann, the Alpha male’s directors' director, hauls us up by the shirt collar, feet kicking the air, as his super-megapixel camera throws gangster gun battles across the screen. This is a star-studded, 80m dollar production of the story of a notorious Depression-era gangster, John Dillinger.

Sight and Sound this month covers the history of the gangster movie. It mentions the visual impact of the digital rendering in this film and how it can leave too many marks stuck on the screen like drying ink. It can make you think it looks like today and it brings to mind the shiny amber light around Cruise in the hitman thriller, Collateral (2004).

Johnny Depp plays John Dillinger alongside Marion Cotillard's (Piaf) hat check girl, Billie. There's Christian Bale as FBI agent Melvin Purvis in hot pursuit on behalf of the ambitious J. Edgar Hoover. The barely sketched background is FBI boss Hoover’s campaign to make his agency the most powerful law enforcement body in the country.

Bank robbers like the Barker Gang, Baby Face Nelson, Machine Gun Kelly, Pretty boy Floyd and Bonnie and Clyde created a crime wave that played directly into the hands of Hoover. The US Governments ill-conceived ban on alcohol inadvertently brought the underworld into national prominence. Gangsters became part of a social and cultural upheaval, subverting traditional values. Film makers depicted a period of underworld counter-culture gone mainstream that became known as the Jazz Age. It's a long 2hrs and 20mins but the background ha been simplified out of the story to allow for fast, loose and commercial action.

This is a glossy, high-image production featuring fabulous 1930s period costume. You'll remember those swishing black great-coats, low-brow fedoras, flashing tommy guns, and gliding, screeching, gas-guzzling roadsters from all those magnificent early gangster movies such as Little Caesar (1930) with Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney in The Public Enemy (1931). Many of the key scenes are shot in the actual locations where the events took place, for example the failed FBI raid at the Little Bohemia lodge and Dillinger’s escape from Lake County Jail.