Dale Robertson as Purvis pursues Harris Yulin as Machine Gun Kelly in this cartoonish boy's adventure story. Yulin may be a psychopath, but he has the unswerving loyalty of his wife, Margaret Blye.
I write that it is cartoonish, and it usually is, with Purvis playing a long game and outthinking everyone else. There are occasional outbursts of real anger, particularly around Dick Sargent, a kidnap victim released for half a million dollars who trades information on the gang for the right to go along and shoot at the funny animals.
In reality, Purvis was in constant conflict with the staff around J. Edgar Hoover, who appears to have been jealous of his publicity. He eventually resigned, returned to private life, and later served in the Provost Marshall's office during the Second World War, and still later helped establish the protocols for the Nuremberg trials. He died in 1960 from self-inflicted gunshot wounds that may have been accidental.
