Reception
At Rotten Tomatoes all 26 of the critics reviewing the film gave it a "fresh" rating. Andre Sennwald, who reviewed the film for The New York Times upon its April 1931 release, called it "just another gangster film at the Strand, weaker than most in its story, stronger than most in its acting, and, like most, maintaining a certain level of interest through the last burst of machine-gun fire"; Woods and Cagney give "remarkably lifelike portraits of young hoodlums" and "Beryl Mercer as Tom's mother, Robert Emmett O'Connor as a gang chief, and Donald Cook as Tom's brother, do splendidly." Time magazine called The Public Enemy "well-told" and noted "Unlike City Streets, this is not a Hugoesque fable of gangsters fighting among themselves, but a documentary drama of the bandit standing against society. It carries to its ultimate absurdity the fashion for romanticizing gangsters, for even in defeat the public enemy is endowed with grandeur." Variety called it "low-brow material given such workmanship as to make it high-brow" which attempts to "square everything a foreword and postscript moralizing on the gangster as a menace to the public welfare."
A theatre in Times Square ran The Public Enemy 24 hours a day during its initial release.
At the 4th Academy Awards, the film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Story, losing to The Dawn Patrol.
Read more about this topic: The Public Enemy
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