On July 19, 1934, Sage contacted Melvin Purvis’s office. She said she knew Dillinger and could identify him. She wanted to work with the FBI in exchange for help with her deportation case. Purvis and Samuel Cowley, who was coordinating the Chicago operation for the Bureau, met with her. They told her they could only bring her cooperation to the attention of the Department of Labor — the agency handling her case — but could not guarantee any outcome. Sage agreed to inform anyway.
Her specific offer: she would tell agents when and where Dillinger would be, and she would identify herself by wearing a distinctive outfit so agents positioned around the location could recognize her among the crowd.
On July 22, 1934, Sage called Purvis’s office. She said she was going to a movie with Dillinger and Hamilton that evening, and that the film would be at either the Biograph Theater on Lincoln Avenue or the Marbro. She said she would wear an orange dress. Purvis staked out both theaters; when she was confirmed at the Biograph — the dress appearing orange-red under the marquee lights, a distinction that would later generate the misleading “Lady in Red” label — agents were concentrated there.
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## The Biograph: The Film, the Signal, the Shots
The film playing at the Biograph Theater on the night of July 22, 1934, was *Manhattan Melodrama*, a gangster picture starring Clark Gable, William Powell, and Myrna Loy. The film told the story of two friends, one who becomes a district attorney and one who becomes a gangster, whose paths ultimately collide. Contemporary accounts and later commentators have noted the film’s thematic resonance with the evening’s events, though any significance is strictly retrospective.