None of the people involved in this "making of" can see the forest for the trees. Legal slavery was a bad law written into the original version of the U.S. Constitution. Thousands died during the U.S. Civil War in order to amend said document and erase the bad law, and Hollywood has made countless movies glorifying this sacrifice. Today, 99% of Americans consider Prohibition a BAD law, written into the U.S. Constitution of the 1920s. Figures just as heroic as PUBLIC ENEMY's fictitious boot-legger Tom Powers (James Cagney) died during that decade to overturn this legal miscarriage (by keeping the forbidden pleasures of beer and wine alive on the palate of a generation that otherwise would have been doomed to tee-totaling ignorance), but director William A. Wellman's ENEMY movie makes a mockery of their sacrifice. Instead of showing the esteem the public held for such men, that allowed Joe Kennedy Senior's sons to be elected to the U.S. House, Senate, and Presidency, it portrays these wily beer-smuggling stalwarts as some kind of family outcasts, having their hard-won profits literally torn up by supercilious siblings. PUBLIC ENEMY was totally out-of-touch with the realities of its day, and this "making of"--while deserving a rating of "10" for technical merit--must be debited at least two rating points for being equally oblivious to which Powers brother was ultimately the good guy here: the brazen forward-thinking, grapefruit-mashing wise guy, not the namby pamby globe-trotting look-at-me-I'm-a-wounded-Marine-war-hero-with-a-chest-full-of-medals Ashley Wilkes clone.
Beer and Blood: Enemies of the Public
(2005 Video)
No beer for these horses
1 July 2009
Warning: Spoilers