In truth, he was an anti-utopian, ever fearful that the only way wide-opened dreams are actualized is with the heavy drop of a jackboot. In Orwell's world, Spanish bombs dropping all around him turned him into what he considered to be a realist and what some others have classified as a bitter pessimist. The son of Maria and Mikhail, also known as Alexei Ivanovich, also known as Fyodor Dostoyevsky, insisted that freedom is the freedom to believe that two plus two equals five. Winston Smith, also known as Eric Blair, also known as George Orwell, insisted that freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two equals four. Again and again, while strolling through the AIP resume, we find glorious examples of small-d divine inspiration. That too is inoffensive because of the ambitious amateurism of the filmmakers. The film exploits the legend of that and a slew of Cagney and Robinson movies. On the down side, the notion that a Jew's harp and banjo make a soundtrack plays a pathetic homage to Bonnie and Clyde, a substantially more affecting motion picture. When Dick Sargent, as the kidnap victim, tries to understand her, she makes it clear to him that he is responsible for their lifestyle, a political thought infinitely beyond the awareness of her colleagues. Kate (played by Margaret Blye) is an outlaw, not a criminal. Here we have nothing at all to cling to regarding the criminals, primarily because the way Kelly is presented here (again, historically accurate) reveals him to be a bully, a coward, a cheat, and not especially attractive. In a lot of gangster movies of the era-the subjects of which Purvis narrates in the opening scene-the emphasis was on the folklore components of the outlaws. He walks onto the scene of a kidnapping from the night before at some oblivious industrialist's party and, after surveying the crime scene, snatches a fine cigar from the humidor and requests an assistant to pour them both some of the victim's champagne. Here was the long-term host of a Wells Fargo TV Western series playing an egomaniacal, self-indulgent, humorous and occasionally sentimental and always well-tailored agent of J. Well, that and Dale Robertson's dead pan performance in the title role. And Kelly actually did beg those who apprehended him not to shoot, while calling them out as "G-Men." But verisimilitude rather than factual accuracy is what makes this film such a delightful success. The collected pay-off was $200,000, rather than $500,000, but the movie makes more reference to the former amount than the latter, so somebody at AIP evidently knew the difference. There actually was a loose five hundred dollars from the paid ransom. Kelly and associates really did kidnap a rich guy-actually two of them-and held them for ransom. ![]() George Kelly's wife Kate really did work at developing the mythology around her husband. In fact, writer John Milius and director Dan Curtis place all sorts of historical clues throughout the movie, most of which are correct in detail and wrong in general, something that comes off as remarkably effective, even to Prohibition-era gangster buffs. While I'm fairly certain that Special Agent Melvin Purvis was never involved in the investigation, much less the capture, of the Machine Gun Kelly Gang, that does not prevent the American International Pictures film, Melvin Purvis: G-Man (1974), from being a hell of a good time for one and all.
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