"Dillinger Is Dead"

By David Hudson on 02/27/2009

[Updated]

"Even the gas mask designed by Glauco (Michel Piccoli), the central figure in Marco Ferreri's 1969 'Dillinger Is Dead,' offers little protection against the toxicity of materialism and bourgeois living that hangs thick in the movie's petrified 60s air," writes Scott Foundas in the Voice. "A signature love-it-or-hate-it provocation from the Italian ringmaster best known for giving us the gorging gastronomes of 'La Grande bouffe' and the self-castrating Gérard Depardieu of 'The Last Woman,' the rarely screened Dillinger (which plays at BAM this week in a new 35mm print) unfolds almost entirely within the confines of Glauco's mod apartment, where consumerist clutter is the abiding principle: One room's sleek, modular furniture abuts another's Navajo chic."

"Mr Ferreri isn't just nodding at Marcuse," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times: "the entire film seems to be an attempt to give narrative shape to his ideas about domination and social control in advanced industrial societies. Although Marcuse believes that bourgeois art is defanged ('the music of the soul is also the music of salesmanship'), at its best art represents what he calls 'the Great Refusal - the protest against that which is.' Over his long night Glauco undergoes a transformation that directly invokes the mythic figure Orpheus, whom Marcuse sees as a symbol of the Great Refusal. Orpheus represents liberation through 'the redemption of pleasure, the halt of time, the absorption of death; silence, sleep, night, paradise,' virtues that Mr Ferreri attempts to replicate in 'Dillinger Is Dead.'"

"Misogynist fantasy or satire of misogynist fantasy?" asks Michael Joshua Rowin in the L Magazine. "Located historically and stylistically smack between Pasolini's 'Teorema' and Fassbinder and Fengler's Why Does Herr R Run Amok?' - those other late 60s erotic and thanatotic violations of upper-middle class security - 'Dillinger' upends a meticulously quotidian account of its comfortably situated protagonist's unraveling with kooky and caustic surrealism."

"With oblique, slow-roast episodes that could enter Italian archives as 'Bored Bourgeoisie, 1969,' Ferreri's movie remains a loaded gun, one certainly unfit for those spectators who want a bulletpointed plot," writes Jason Jude Chan in Flavorwire. "The critique's subversive effect is near imperceptible until it's too late; it's only after a chiefly mysterious, meandering runtime that the viewer is treated to an in-your-face act that's not unlike a sudden whiff of smelling salts. Indeed, as the evening progresses, Glaucho ceremonially sloughs off his old, empty roles (as husband, industrial designer, etc) and comes to embrace the purified, or unmasked, individual - best embodied by Dillinger (seen in archival footage), a bank robber with a mug that many could ID for his exploits."

"The titular gangster isn't the only one who's dead," write David Fear in Time Out New York; "according to Ferreri, it was a condition shared by everyone who bought into the late-20th-century ideal of success."

Update: Vadim Rizov at the House Next Door: "It's entertaining and well-worth rediscovering, which doesn't mean it should be taken seriously; despite trying to think slightly ahead of the times, it's firmly trapped in them, like a smart-ass who's less self-aware than he realizes."

[Photo: "Dillinger Is Dead," Pegaso Cinematografica, 1969]

Tags: Dillinger Is Dead, Italian Cinema, Marco Ferreri, Michel Piccoli