Frank Connor/Universal
Johnny Depp and Marion Cotillard star in Michael Mann’s “Public Enemies.”

IT’S a Hollywood truism that for every movie that sees the light of day, a hundred others languish in the purgatory (or worse) of development. But how many movies owe their very existence to a roster of films that never happened? Such is the case with Michael Mann’s “Public Enemies,” a dual portrait of the bank robber John Dillinger (Johnny Depp) and Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale), the young, ambitious F.B.I. agent who took him down.

The film, which opens Wednesday, is unusual on many fronts. Its Depression-era setting, R rating and dense storytelling make it an anomaly, an Oscar hopeful planted in the middle of a season traditionally more accommodating to the shape-shifting robots of “Transformers” than to J. Edgar Hoover. It refurbishes a genre — the 1930s gangster movie — that studios have left largely unexploited in the two decades since Brian De Palma’s “Untouchables.” And, appropriately, it leaves a trail of cinematic corpses in its wake: two feature films, an HBO mini-series and a prison epic starring Mr. Depp. With its portrayal of two men clenched by obsession and its meticulous visual sheen, “Public Enemies” plays as if it were intended to be a Michael Mann movie all along. But it got there the hard way.

The project began its life, sort of, in the mind of Mr. Mann before he had even embarked on his directorial career, which now runs to 10 movies over 29 years. Mr. Mann, 66, grew up in Chicago, not far from where Dillinger spent his last months hiding out. In the 1970s, he recalled, “my wife and I used to go to art films at the Biograph,” the movie house where Dillinger spent his last night watching the Clark Gable gangster film “Manhattan Melodrama” before F.B.I. agents gunned him down on the street outside. Fascinated by the period, Mr. Mann began work on a screenplay, not about Dillinger but about Alvin Karpis, one of the last of that era’s criminals to be captured.

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