A few years ago, New York Times movie reviewer A.O. Scott wrote a eulogy for Charles Bronson.

Scott noted that “Mr. Bronson mixed it up with other roughneck character actors like Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine and George Kennedy, whose faces and physiques suggest that the 1960s were good years to be an ugly man in Hollywood.”

“Ugly” is a bad word, but I know what Scott was getting at. And his line came to mind when I was watching “Public Enemies” yesterday.

It wasn’t so much the two pretty boy lead actors (Johnny Depp and Christian Bale) that I kept waiting to appear on screen. Instead it was the rogues’ gallery of second bananas – the cohorts of John Dillinger and FBI Agent Melvin Purvis – that attracted my attention. It was the agents with thick necks bursting the stitches of their white collars; or the flinty lawmen brought up from the Southwest to hunt Dillinger; or the moon-face psychotics in Dillinger’s gang.

I haven’t seen a movie with such memorable mugs since the last movie featuring Baby Face Nelson – “Oh Brother Where Art Thou.” Perhaps, Hollywood believes that men with character only existed in the 1930s.

I’d like to see a return to the 1960s, when directors like Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah hired gritty actors like Eli Wallach, Jack Elam, Ben Johnson, Jason Robards and Warren Oates (who also portrayed John Dillinger) as movie leads. They said more with a glance than with a page of dialogue.

These were real guys with real looks, and they ushered in a great age of cinema.

Later that night I learned that Karl Malden had died – another actor of untypical Hollywood looks, who always stole the show.

Nowadays, Minnesota’s own Coen brothers are often the only directors not afraid to hire actors who don’t fit a modeling agency mold. It’s a rush whenever they cast some of their regulars – like John Turturro or John Goodman – in a movie.

I’d like to think that it’s a Minnesota trait to recognize that quality goes beyond looks, and that there’s nothing ugly about great acting.