Public enemy it to describe various notorious fugitives they were pursuing throughout the 1930s. Unlike Loesch's use of the term, the FBI's "Public Enemies" were wanted criminals and fugitives who were already charged with crimes. Among the criminals whom the FBI called "public enemies" were John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, Bonnie and Clyde, Pretty Boy Floyd, Machine Gun Kelly, Ma Barker, and Alvin Karpis. The term was used so extensively during the 1930s that some writers call that period of the FBI's early (the BOI became the FBI in 1935) history the "Public Enemy Era". Dillinger, Floyd, Nelson, and Karpis, in that
The Public Enemy 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 [with] a foreword and postscript moralizing on the gangster as a menace to the public welfare." A theatre in Times