It mirrors the parallel cop/robber structure of Heat, with somewhat less focus on the cop procedural part than I'd have liked. The glimpses of the nascent arts of "scientific" crimefighting, including wiretaps and CI's, were fascinating. Thankfully we are not tortured with endless scenes of Melvin Purvis's family life; there is only the terse title card at the end of the film, telling of his ultimate fate, that hints at more than professional turmoil in his life.

The thing I appreciate most about Michael Mann's films is also the thing that dooms him to perennial box-office failure: he does a minimal amount of hand-holding for the audience. He trusts the script and the actors to convey a tangled and complex plot with a myriad of characters both major and minor; he trusts the audience to keep track of multiple threads without constantly reminding them of who's who and what's what. Once a plot point is established, whether by a murmur or a glance or an establishing shot, he does not feel the need to revisit the facts until the characters do so organically and logically. There's precious little "As you know, Bob"-style expository dialogue — Michael Mann could never direct an episode of "24"; his artistic integrity would explode. Yet without such audience crutches, his films are often thought of as "brooding" or sterile or austere or incomprehesible. Brooding and austere they may be, but I think of this as a strength, not a weakness. The vast majority of filmgoers out for a couple of brainless hours in an air-conditioned theater may not agree with me or other Mann-fans on that point. (For example, I'm the only person I know who LOVED Miami Vice. Maybe there's something wrong with me but I find new things to admire every time I watch it.)

Then there's Mann's approach to action scenes. Violence in Mann films (and Public Enemies is emblematic in this regard) comes on like a thunderstorm rolling up a valley: He tends to start off with wide angles and deep focus as the first shots rattle like stones thrown against sheet-metal, then plunge into close-up, tightly focused shots of individuals struggling to survive as bullets smack around them or into them. Firefights degenerate into confused melees of strobing muzzle flashes and fragments of glass and masonry, in which survival and victory are more a product of luck and one side making fewer mistakes than the other.

Public Enemies is very much a Michael Mann film, and that is a very good thing.

*SPOILERS*

Both the Oates film and the new one mitigate Little Bohemia by killing off most of the gang, when in fact they got clean away. At the beginning of the raid Agent Carter Baum accidentally killed a bystander and was guilt-stricken enough to throw his guns away. Purvis sent him on what should have been a safe errand round the lake. Unfortunately Baum ran into Nelson, was apparently unwilling to defend himself and was murdered. It may be a bit melodramatic, but it's true and nicely encapsulates the way the Feds were basically decent but completely out of their depth. The film has Purvis shooting up the innocents, so Baum isn't traumatised and his death becomes just another case of someone being unlucky enough to get in Nelson's way.

Please tell me what exactly was the "rather strange omission from the Little Bohemia sequence" ??
Just a few days ago I finally saw the Warren Oates film about Dillinger (for the first time),
so I have some notion of what the Little Bohemia sequence entails …

Dillinger is charismatic, superficially attractive, thoroughly amoral, and hangs out with very scary and violent people: that seems fairly accurate to me and I wouldn't say he's unfairly romanticised as a character.

[cont.]

To say that a movie omits or glosses over historical facts is not to imply that it makes either Dillinger or Pervis more romatic than they ought to be. You can leave details out for any number of reasons. Because they don't fit the characterization you've chosen to portray. Becuase there isn't enough time. To preserve the internal consistency of the plot. Writers/directors have to have discretion. The constraints of storytelling, and movie storytelling in particular, demand so. This is fiction, after all, not a documentary.

I've always thought 'Public enemies' was a rather misleading title for the book, as it's focussed on, and sympathetic to, the FBI far more than the bandits. Which isn't to say that it ignores quite how incompetent the G-Men were for the first months of the War on Crime. Burrough certainly has some harsh comments about the cinematic glorification of Clyde Barrow.