BUGSY
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1991 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule review: Barry Levinson has a real touch for
putting myth on film. This is the story of the West Coast
career of Ben "Bugsy" Siegel. It is glossy with an expensive
look, but like most gangster films it gets many of its facts
wrong. Rating: high +1 (-4 to +4). (Spoiler section follows
review to set the record straight.)
Barry Levinson is a director who concentrates on putting myth onto film. Most commonly he mythologizes about his roots in Baltimore. He tells stories about his family and friends when he was growing up. Perhaps his best myth to date is the fantasy-sports story THE NATURAL. In GOOD MORNING, VIETNAM his mythical hero was the irreverent disk jockey who bucks the system. Perhaps it is not surprising that he would eventually turn to making films about one of America's two great mythical figures, the cowboy and the gangster. However, while cowboy films are on the skids, gangster films are on the upswing, so he picked a well-known gangster, Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel. (In fact, this film ties in with MOBSTERS earlier this year in which Siegel was one of the four title characters. Also, Siegel is assumed by many to have been the real murderer of Bo Greenberg. BILLY BATHGATE begins showing Dutch Schultz committing the crime. Lucky Luciano has been a character in all three films; the three gangster films are all intertwined.) Levinson chose to tell the story of the ten years from 1937 to 1947, when Siegel was a major crime figure on the West Coast.
When BUGSY opens, Siegel (played by Warren Beatty) is being sent to Los Angeles on a twelve-day errand. Siegel is anxious to get together with boyhood friend George Raft (played by Joe Mantegna). Siegel is flush with easy money and decides to stay in California and buy himself the California lifestyle. He does this quite literally. Being told that a house belonged to famous opera singer Lawrence Tibbet, it takes Siegel less than five minutes to more or less force his way in and buy the house from Tibbet. Two things capture Bugsy's imagination. One is a minor actress, Virginia Hill (played by Annette Bening), and the other is a patch of barren desert where gambling is legal--it is called Las Vegas. Siegel decides to master each.
Beatty plays Siegel as a man of mercurial temperament. One moment he can be charming, the next he can be in a murderous rage. Many of his ideas are totally off the wall. He discovers that one of his lovers is married to a personal friend of Mussolini. He decides he wants to parlay this into a plot to murder Mussolini because he does not like what Mussolini stands for. On the other hand, his plan for a casino and landing strip at Las Vegas was visionary.
This is very much Beatty's show. Bening's Virginia Hill is very much like Bening's character in THE GRIFTERS. Harvey Keitel and Joe Mantegna-- both good actors--get seen without much opportunity to act. On the other hand, Elliot Gould, usually not such a fine actor, takes a small part as a forlorn gangster and nearly steals the whole film. Remarkably, even a great actor like Ben Kingsley (as Meyer Lansky) comes off wooden and uninteresting compared to Gould.
This film has been getting a lot of attention, probably in no small part due to the look of the set direction and the photography. The film is not afraid to show a steamy love scene as just two shadows on a screen. The photography catches the neon nights of Los Angeles's center or the foggy nights of its suburbs. The film has a well-done if somewhat subdued score from Ennio Morricone. Several of his themes are reminiscent of his UNTOUCHABLES score. Levinson's direction, however, does not sustain the mood. There is, for example, a rather silly scene of Siegel trying to run a birthday party for his young daughter while having a meeting with the syndicate in his living room. It only serves to damage the atmosphere.
Overall, in spite of several good reports, I have to say that BUGSY is just a stylish gangster film that generally tells a true story, though some of its facts are wrong. I rate it a +1 on the -4 to +4 scale.
**SPOILER**
It is clear that somebody somewhere along the line really did some research on Siegel. The story as we see it is basically correct, though there are numerous factual errors. The major flaw is in how Virginia Hill is portrayed. She is supposed to be an actress. In fact, she was an Alabama girl who came to Chicago to be a cooch dancer for the 1934 World's Fair. After that her occupation seemed to be mistress. She was handed around by several well-known gangsters including Frank Nitti, Frank Costello, and of course, Joey Adonis and Bugsy Siegel, with whom she finally settled down. The newspapers labeled her "the Queen of the Mob." She wasn't the queen, but she did run errands for the syndicate. No reference I can find indicates she ever was an actress. I know that the New York Times never listed her in the credits of a film, since her name does not appear in their directory.
Siegel did not have a plot to kill Mussolini. He did travel to Italy to try to sell Il Duce an experimental explosive which turned out not to work. He had to return Mussolini's investment of $40,000. While there he met Hermann Goering and Joseph Goebbels. It is an underworld legend that he took a dislike to them and started hatching a plot to murder them. (I found this story in two different references--honest!)
Harry "Big Greenie" Greenberg did not go to Los Angeles to ask Siegel's help. He went for a place to hide out. The syndicate found out Big Greenie was in California and asked Bugsy to arrange his death. Not content just to arrange, Siegel took two other men and killed Greenie himself. They shot him as he was returning home one day.
The idea of Bugsy staying in California was that of the syndicate, not Bugsy himself on a twelve-day trip. The story of buying the Tibbet house was fun, but probably untrue, since Bugsy only rented the house.
The Flamingo did not open on Christmas Day 1946, but the day after. The turnout was poor, but there were people coming and gambling. Further, Bugsy was not killed for several months and by then the casino was starting to show a profit. Virginia Hill was probably not bright enough to hide her embezzling from Siegel. And even if she was, she was depositing the money by shuttling frequently to Europe and personally making the deposits. It seems unthinkable that Bugsy would not have known and, in fact, planned the operation. Virginia was in Europe, not at the Flamingo, June 20, 1947, when Bugsy was shot. Bugsy was not alone, however; a friend with whom he had dinner was present. The film implies that Hill committed suicide in Austria as a result of Siegel's death. Actually, it was nineteen years, several lovers, and a husband later.
Mark R. Leeper
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