Manhattan Melodrama

Sunday, July 22nd, 1934 had been stifling in Chicago. Many thousands of hot, Depression-weary Chicagoans decided to cool off in the city’s movie theaters. Some chose from among the several lavish houses run by the city’s legendary exhibition moguls, Balaban and Katz. They dressed up and took the streetcar to ornate movie palaces like the Chicago, the Oriental, the Riviera, the Uptown. Others simply walked to their neighborhood theaters. As the sun set, Chicago’s movie fans made their way to see that year’s first run films downtown, and dozens of older films in the smaller, second run houses. In the middle-class North Side neighborhood of Lincoln Park, the choice was the Biograph, a well-kept smaller theater that was showing a gangster film, MANHATTAN MELODRAMA. The show let out about 10:30, and the crowd began to wander out under the Biograph’s marquee, some of them idling at the showcases filled with lobby cards of the film’s stars, Clark Gable, Myrna Loy, and William Powell. Few noticed the men in dark suits standing tensely around a clutch of big sedans parked across from the theater on North Lincoln Street. When a smiling man emerged with two women, one of them in a vivid red dress, a shorter man nearby suddenly lit a cigar. The two men locked eyes. The shorter man dropped his cigar and drew a pistol, and ordered the smiling man to halt. In response, the smiling man reached into his trouser pocket and made a dash down the sidewalk, turning up the alley that ran past the stage door of the Biograph. The shorter man led two others in pursuit. They began shooting, and their quarry dropped, hit by two bullets. John Dillinger, the true-life notorious gangster, was dead at the hands of the FBI. (Stolen from http://www.albany.edu)