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The Public Enemy
Two young Chicago hoodlums, Tom Powers and Matt Doyle, rise up from their poverty-stricken slum life to become petty thieves, bootleggers and cold-blooded killers. But when one of their colleagues dies in a freak accident, a rival bootlegging faction senses weakness among Tom and Matt's gang...
13 August 1876, Surrey, England, UK
24 July 1889, London, England, UK
5 July 1903, Los Angeles, California, USA
26 September 1901, Portland, Oregon, USA
3 March 1911, Kansas City, Missouri, USA
12 March 1902, Liverpool, England, UK
30 August 1906, New York City, New York, USA
18 March 1885, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA
17 July 1899, New York City, New York, USA
March 02, 2008
Top notch Cagney gangster flick with memorable final scene.
October 30, 2007
Still a classic of the gangster genre, showing neither glorifying the life nor pulling its punches.
January 01, 2000
James Cagney's portrayal of a bootlegging runt is truly electrifying (he'd made five films, but this one made him a star), and Jean Harlow makes the tartiest tart imaginable.
February 20, 2006
The implication is that there are hundreds, maybe thousands of guys like Tom Powers, little criminals living fast and dying hard.
August 12, 2011
This early sound film, which made a star of James Cagney, remains one of the most influential crime-gangster films ever made, establishing the basic narrative format of the popular genre.
February 09, 2006
Cagney's energy and Wellman's gutsy direction carry the day, counteracting the moralistic sentimentality of the script and indelibly etching the star on the memory as a definitive gangster hero.
July 05, 2009
Crime may not pay, but The Public Enemy was one of the first pictures to recognize that it sure can be exciting to watch.
January 14, 2016
In spite of woodenness, creakiness in plot, and unintentional humor in printed piety, ' The Public Enemy,' a film of its time, was a sensation at that time, and is still not to be missed today.
December 15, 2007
The film's juiciest scene has the misogynist Tom squeeze a half a grapefruit in his nagging girlfriend Kitty's (Mae Clarke) kisser.
January 20, 2006
The film set the template for the likes of "Scarface" and "GoodFellas."
October 30, 2007
There's no lace on this picture. It's raw and brutal. It's low-brow material given such workmanship as to make it high-brow.
April 09, 2006
Its success proved, if by then there was any doubt, that audiences will go for a charismatic lowlife over a dull hero any day of the week, a lesson Hollywood never forgot.
