Friday, July 10, 2009

"Public Enemies" Uptown Slide Show

The Sun-Times's website has a slide show featuring the lobby and bank vault of the Bridgeview Bank Building (formerly the Uptown Bank Building, formerly the Sheridan Trust & Savings Bank), which doubles as a Racine bank robbed by John Dillinger in the early scenes of Public Enemies. During the interior scenes, it's a familiar site to Uptowners... but outside, this is how the bank looks in the movie.

Incidentally, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel says that Public Enemies director Michael Mann had his first savings account, at age 14, at Uptown Bank, which may be why he chose to shoot the scenes there. You can also see a lot of the interior of the Aragon, and a few brief glimpses of the exterior, standing in as the nightclub where Dillinger first encountered girlfriend Billie Frechette.

If Public Enemies intrigued you about Uptown's gangster past, check out an old post on Dillinger's Uptown haunts here. Or just type "Dillinger" in the "Search Blog" window in the upper left-hand corner of UU for posts about the man himself, and the movie as it was being filmed.

1 comment:

  1. Are you all proud of this or something? I'm just not getting it.

    ReplyDelete