Media Magazine articles/quotes:

The historical context: prohibition and poverty
The backdrop to the narrative of The Public Enemy is twofold: Prohibition and the Great Depression. The era of Prohibition was between 1919 and 1933. The American government, under the Eighteenth Amendment, made it illegal to manufacture liquor with an alcohol percentage above 0.5%. This was formalised in law by the Volstead Act of 1920, and not repealed until 1933. This law however, only condemned the supplier of liquor, not the drinker. An underground world of clubs and speakeasies was formed and the illegal racketeering of alcohol gave way to a complex arrangement of organised crime (Social, political and historical context).

Prohibition is central to the narrative of The Public Enemy in several scenes, but at the very start of the film we are shown the brewery, with lots of people involved in the manufacture of beer and liquor. Then when we cut to 1920 (shown in text on the screen) we see a ‘Family Liquor Store’ selling off all stock due to Prohibition, and people clearly roaring drunk as a consequence, falling over in the street, and loading up their cars and babies’ prams with liquor. We then cut to a scene in a bar where Paddy Ryan the bar owner has a conversation with Tom and Matt about how expensive alcohol is and tells them that if they can get hold of it he will buy it off them. We see Matt and Tom loading up a gasoline tanker with alcohol, having broken into a warehouse. At this point in the narrative we realise that they have come of age as gangsters; the job does not go wrong, and they are now on a path of dealing alcohol during Prohibition (Textual analysis and social/historical context).

The American Depression was part of a world-wide economic slump provoked by the collapse of the Wall Street stock market in 1929. By the late 1920s, audiences had begun to distrust the cheery optimism of Hollywood’s musicals and fantasies; Warner Brothers exploited this change of mood with the creation of the reality-based gangster genre (Social, cultural and historical context).
When we do a textual analysis of the opening of The Public Enemy it is clear that the Great Depression forms a backdrop to the narrative. From its opening moments, we see that it’s set in 1909; there is a shot of a bustling street, then a rundown neighbourhood, a brewery, a Salvation Army band – and then we are introduced to a young Tom and Matt in scruffy clothes drinking beer from a bucket. They proceed to steal from a department store but get away. We are shown the first glimpse of their neighbourhood, which is quite clearly run down; although this is pre-Depression America, all the signs are in place for things to go rapidly downhill once the stock market crashes (Textual analysis and social/historical context).