The Biograph, and its restored marquee, look frozen in the summer of nineteen thirty-four. That's deliberate, and there's a reason. On a July night that year, the most wanted man in America walked in here to see a movie and never made it home.
This one isn't a Capone story. This is John Dillinger, a completely different animal — a bank robber, and a famous one. During the Depression, when the banks were the ones foreclosing on everybody, a man who robbed banks was, to a lot of people, doing the Lord's work.
He hit at least two dozen of them. He broke out of jail twice. The second time is the one nobody believes. Locked in a supposedly escape-proof county jail, Dillinger carved a fake pistol out of a block of wood, blackened it with shoe polish, pointed it at his guards, and walked out the front. He escaped a maximum-security jail with arts and crafts. And on the way out he made one small mistake that changed everything — he stole the sheriff's brand-new car and drove it across the st
ate line. Driving a stolen car between states was a federal crime, which is the technicality that finally handed Dillinger to the F-B-I. They named him Public Enemy Number One, an actual title they handed out, like a much scarier Employee of the Month.
By that summer he was a hunted man, and he'd gone to real lengths to disappear. He'd paid a back-alley doctor to alter his face, and dripped acid
