Sight & Sound “Greatest Films of All Time” poll in a 15-way tie in the mid-100s alongside works by such arthouse darlings at Michelangelo Antonioni, Luis Buñuel, Jacques Rivette, Robert Bresson, and Alain Resnais. In the early 2010s, Mann was the butt of a recurring joke inseries, where Steve Coogan wanted to be taken seriously as an actor working with auteurs, and Rob Brydon asked him if he would ever work with a more Hollywood director like Michael Mann.
In Purvis’ case, it is the newly forming federal police force going after cross-state crime, the Bureau of Investigation led by J. Edgar Hoover , and for Dillinger it is the Syndicate, fronted by Frank Nitti . Both institutions are seeking to build national networks, one of coast-to-coast bookie operations, and the other of elite national police units.
People often forget that the genre as it exists in cinema was solidified by Edwin S. Porter’s 1903 film, a movie not about a mythic past, but the present. Although, this still worked with a romanticized frontier past that was also part of the genre form, and which dated back in American literature even before Manifest Destiny, like with James Fenimore Cooper’s).