film criticism by maryann johanson | celebrating 25 years: 1997–2022
We know how it is: You’d like to go to the movies this weekend, but all that street crime isn’t gonna fight itself, and you’ve got to pick up your cape and mask from the dry cleaners, too. But you can have a multiplex-like experience from the comfort of your own sofa with a collection … more…
I’m wildly intrigued by *Public Enemies* even though I readily concede that character development is all but nonexistent, and that it leaves me more wanting to know who notorious bank robber John Dillinger was than I did before I went into the film.
In postwar 1946, three soldiers are coming home to their small midwestern city. Air Force Captain Fred Derry (Dana Andrews), a soda jerk before the war, returns to the railyard slums of his parents; Army Sergeant Al Stephenson (Frederic March), VP of a small bank, has a lovely wife (Myrna Loy) and two perfect children waiting for him in their luxury apartment; Homer Parrish (Harold Russell), a Navy grunt and a kid from a middle-class family, has lost both his hands and hides himself away in his parents’ house.
