BUGSY
A film review by Frank Maloney
Copyright 1991 Frank Maloney
BUGSY is a film by Barry Levinson. It was written by James Toback. It stars Warren Beatty, Annette Bening, Harvey Keitel, Ben Kingsley, Elliott Gould, Joe Mantegna. Rated R for language and violence.
BUGSY is the film biography of Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel, a Jewish gangster, a psychopathic killer, and the "inventor" of Las Vegas. Siegel has been recently portrayed in THE MARRYING MAN and MOBSTERS and, perhaps as Hollywood's resident mobster in the Forties, exercises a powerful charm of the movie makers of today. Certainly, James Toback's funny, alarming, and insightful script loves Siegel, makes us want to love him, even while fully informing us from time to time, lest we forget, that he really was totally bugsy, out of his mind, a very scary guy. Maybe, it's only because Siegel's been dead for almost 35 years that it's safe to see him as an American dreamer and visionary.
First and foremost, the screen belongs to Warren Beatty, who has seemed to me to be a mostly underappreciated treasure by the movie-going public. Instead of focusing on his famous romances, the public could spend the time more instructively studying his subtle mastery in movies like McCABE AND MRS. MILLER, SHAMPOO, and BONNIE AND CLYDE, as well as his behind-the-camera talents in the wonderful REDS, inter alia. And here Beatty gives the fullest, most unreserved demonstration of his formidable powers the camera has ever recorded.
And Annette Bening as Virginia Hill, the starlet and gun moll Siegel fell madly in love with, may be the only female actor of her generation who could hold her own against Beatty's Siegel, as indeed Hill was the only one who could defy the gangster. Some critics are comparing her to Barbara Stanwyck as the very type of the tough-Forties-sexy dame; maybe, but I think Bening head and shoulders above anything Stanwyck ever did. She's every bit as volcanic and unpredictable as her lover, proud, inpatient, no-bull-shit, and glamorous, in way movie women seldom are these days.
BUGSY is overflowing in excellent character performances, too. Harvey Keitel as Mickey Cohen and Joe Mantegna as George Raft are Siegel's friends, allies, and go-fers, supporters who can't stop their friend's inevitable burn-out. Ben Kingsley is the syndicate boss Meyer Lansky, cold and concerned. The late rock promoter Bill Graham is unexpectedly good as Lucky Luciano. And Elliott Gould, looking positively fat, is the slow-witted stool pigeon Harry Greenberg. This is a rich diet for any movie.
And it is all served served up so handsomely. Lyndol, who loves the Forties cars, was agog at the Continentals and 4-door Cadillac convertible, the Packards and Lincolns. Production designer Dennis Gassner, costume designer Albert Wolsky, and cinematographer Allen Daviau (E.T., AVALON) were used by Barry Levinson to create a Forties Hollywood that looks new, deco-ish, slightly raw, glaring, color-soaked exteriors and dark domestic interiors.
Levinson himself deserves high praise for the way he's handled all the disparate elements of his film to create a complex portrait of a man who would easy to dismiss as a mere monster. We see Siegel's darkness (without understanding it), but we also see his romantic obsessions, his attractiveness to men and women, a gangster and murderer, who stop in the middle of a vicious beating to correct his ruffled appearance, who was addicted to facials and cucumber-slices-on-the-eyes, who was more interested in love and creation than in money. His partners and superiors in the Organization dismiss him as Bugsy, but never to his face.
You know, I think you ought to see BUGSY and the cost be hanged. This is a great motion picture.
-- Frank Richard Aloysius Jude Maloney .
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