Bob Cashill shares his knowledge of gangland dramas, setting hopes that Mann will do his subject justice on the upcoming movie Public Enemies. An excerpt is below:

I trust Mann to do a good job with the rich, myth-busting material provided him by author Bryan Burrough; his book is an absolute must-read for anyone interested in J. Edgar Hoover’s “war on terror” in the Depression era, though I’m sorry HBO didn’t pursue a miniseries as had once been planned. (I suspect that only that portion of the book recounting the oft-told story of Dillinger, played by Lawrence Tierney, Warren Oates, and Robert Conrad in past movies, will make it to the big screen.) Through meticulous research, Burrough succeeded in making Dillinger, the Barker gang, Bonnie and Clyde and the whole den of thieves that erupted in the early Thirties smaller than life, shrinking them down to wormy, human size while simultaneously deflating Hoover’s vastly inflated PR about the trackdowns.

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