Dillinger Is Dead

1969

1h 30m

Crime

Drama

List

75%

Tomatometer

12 Reviews

69%

Audience Score

250+ Ratings

Glauco (Michel Piccoli), a middle aged designer, arrives home to find his wife (Anita Pallenberg) already asleep. He seeks diversion in the minutiae of their home, discovering a revolver wrapped in newspaper.

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Scott Tobias

AV Club

Finding the connective tissue between one incident and the next can be its own form of madness, yet the film is transfixing, too, provided viewers yield to it a little.

Rated: B+

Oct 22, 2014

Full Review

Ty Burr

Boston Globe

Dillinger is one of those artful endurance tests that views conventional storytelling as a sell-out. Yet the movie's also playful, droll, and unexpectedly wise within its rigorous framework.

Rated: 3.5/4

Jul 9, 2009

Full Review

J. R. Jones

Chicago Reader

Like an Ionesco one-act, the movie is purposely backloaded, rolling along to no apparent purpose and then climaxing with an absurd act of violence that casts a harsh white glare on the bourgeois self-indulgence that preceded it.

May 29, 2009

Full Review

TV Guide

A bizarre, dark fantasy.

Rated: 2/4

Oct 22, 2014

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James Kendrick

Q Network Film Desk

Seems less groundbreaking than simply intriguing as an artistic relic of a much different cinematic era.

Rated: 3/4

May 4, 2010

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Christopher Long

Movie Metropolis

A finely calibrated exercise in inspired lunacy.

Rated: 9/10

May 1, 2010

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Audience Member

This is one of the most surreal and screwed-up cinematic experiences I have ever seen. Still I was touched and it was beautiful.

Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars

02/06/23

Full Review

Audience Member

"Dillinger Is Dead" would be a total bore if not for its seemingly random act of violence at its climax. Utilizing little dialogue and never much changing its setting, all it does for the majority of its running time is observe an insomniac of a middle-aged man come home from work, watching as he does such mundane activities as eat his dinner, as watch home videos with a sad smile well into the early hours of the morning. His young wife sleeps a pill induced sleep upstairs in the bedroom, mostly uncaring about greeting her husband home with open arms. Realistic in its depiction, but also hopelessly unexciting. And "Dillinger Is Dead" plateaus at being hopelessly unexciting until our protagonist finds a red revolver wrapped in newspaper in his closet, until he eventually commits an apparently unmotivated crime with it. Then does the film shift from unbearably echt to piquantly cautionary - by its conclusion, it's an admonishing take on the unsettlement rooted in middle age, and how long sustained success can, no matter its monetary or personal benefit, imminently drive a person to take drastic measures just to add some sizzle to their foreseeable future. Granted, "Dillinger Is Dead," co-written (with Sergio Bazzini) and directed by Marco Ferreri, is only embedded in half-truth - most of the film is irrepressibly unsentimental; it's its reactionary defining event that turns everything into an extended metaphor - but the movie strikes an avant-garde chord in its discussion of the effects of alienation and how it can alter one's reality after they've come to realize that they have nothing major left to accomplish in their lifetime. We have to wait until the last fifteen minutes of "Dillinger Is Dead" to come to that conclusion, and because everything preceding it ranges from pondering to monotonous (save for its interesting barraging of imagery), the film is, more or less, rewarding. But it also takes a painfully long time to announce itself as being such, and I'm not so sure a movie that only relatively compensates the patience of the viewer can be deemed as a masterpiece. Many critics have declared it to be so, but a deluge has also trashed its accomplishments. I sit somewhere in the middle, sparked by it but also unwilling to forget just how long I had to linger before that spark was ignited. But "Dillinger Is Dead" does remind us why Michel Piccoli, as the film's cryptic leading man, is one of France's most riveting actors, and Anita Pallenberg, as his wife, is able to employ her heroin chic cool so efficiently that her nothing of a role somehow seem like a something. Ferreri's direction is provocative. If only "Dillinger Is Dead" could appear as anything other than an art house plaything.

Rated 2.5 out of 5 stars

02/03/23

Full Review

Audience Member

trippy 60's italian style

Rated 4 out of 5 stars

01/21/23

Full Review

Audience Member

This is one of the most surreal and screwed-up cinematic experiences I have ever seen. Still I was touched and it was beautiful.

Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars

02/24/23

Full Review

Audience Member

Awful pretentious muck that is still occasionally enjoyable because of Piccoli mostly.

Rated 1.5 out of 5 stars

01/25/23

Full Review

Audience Member

"Isolation in a chamber that must be sealed off from the outside world because it's full of deadly gas... Strongly evokes the conditions under which man lives.."

Rated 5 out of 5 stars

02/04/23

Full Review

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Marco Ferreri

Director

Michel Piccoli

Glauco

Anita Pallenberg

Glauco's Wife

Gino Lavagetto

Marine

Marco Ferreri

Writer

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Synopsis

Glauco (Michel Piccoli), a middle aged designer, arrives home to find his wife (Anita Pallenberg) already asleep. He seeks diversion in the minutiae of their home, discovering a revolver wrapped in newspaper.

Director: Marco Ferreri
Screenwriter: Marco Ferreri
Production Co: Pegaso Cinematografica
Genre: Crime, Drama
Original Language: Italian
Runtime: 1h 30m