20 Things You Didn't Know About O Brother, Where Art Thou?
5. The Real Baby Face Nelson Had Already Been Dead For Three Years By The Movie's Setting
The third in O Brother, Where Art Thou?'s triumverate of true-life thirties personalities is Coen regular Michael Badalucco as George "Baby Face" Nelson, the bank robber who was at one time deemed America's "Public Enemy Number 1".
In the movie Everett, Pete and Delmar inadvertantly assist Nelson, here portrayed as an unpredictable thrill-seeker and subject to wild mood swings, in robbing a bank. Later on he shows up being dragged away by a mob to face the electric chair.
Still, it could be said that the movie's Baby Face has done pretty well even to make it that far as, given the purported 1937 setting, his real world counterpart would have already been dead for three years by the time his movie version runs into Everett and his companions.
In reality, Baby Face Nelson was gunned down by FBI agents in the so-called "Battle Of Barrington", a gun fight that took place outside Chicago in November 1934. So perhaps O Brother takes place in an alternate world in which he survived and moved south instead.
More recently, Nelson has showed up as a character in the movie Public Enemies, which countered O Brother keeping him alive after his real death by instead killing him off early, before he had a chance to take his former confederate John Dillinger's place as Public Enemy Number 1.