TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/120991/1209420.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 7.1 KB | 146 lines

                                                                                CINEMA, Page 90

A Killer Goes to Hollywood


Warren Beatty's Bugsy is a wickedly elegant and very smart
orchestration of crime, sex and other American ambiguities

By RICHARD SCHICKEL -- With reporting by Martha Smilgis/
Los Angeles


    To the list of tragic American Dreamers, people who
martyred themselves for visions that stubbornly refused
realization while they lived -- one thinks of rocket scientist
Robert Goddard and car manufacturer Preston Tucker -- it seems
we must now add the name of Benjamin Siegel. His great notion
was the reinvention of Las Vegas, converting it from a sleepy
cow town into a gaudy pleasure dome where everything that was
illicit elsewhere in the puritanical U.S. of a half-century ago
was openly available on a gloriously legal basis.

    This was, to be sure, a dubious, not to say tacky,
achievement. But it was also psychically and financially a
potent one. For Ben was right: America needed Las Vegas without
knowing it did.

    That he died prematurely, of an overdose of .30-cal.
bullets fired into him at the behest of business associates
impatient with the slow return on their investment in his dream,
is poignant. And ironic as well. Because before Siegel got
around to reinventing Las Vegas, his most important project was
reinventing himself. Far better known in the press and gossip
of his glory days, the 1940s, as "Bugsy," he was perhaps the
most famous mobster of his era. Not that he liked his colorful
sobriquet (he tended to punch out people who used it in his
presence) or his public identification as a hood (his preference
was "sportsman").

    He was, as well, a careful dresser, an elocution student
struggling to improve his diction and a citizen eager to put his
hit man's skill to patriotic use; he fondly nurtured a plan to
assassinate Mussolini. Above all, he was bedazzled by the mutual
admiration that developed between him and the movie stars and
moguls he met after moving to Los Angeles to oversee his
syndicate's West Coast gambling interests. That he was subject
to outbursts of violently sociopathic, possibly psychopathic,
rage in no way damaged his self-estimation and probably enhanced
his glamour in Hollywood's eyes. In a town that likes to talk
tough, an authentic tough guy has star quality.

    It may be that the best thing about Bugsy, the elegantly
made, wickedly perverse and very smart new movie about the last
years of Siegel's life, is that you don't have to impose any of
these interpretations on it. Indeed, it suggests most of them
-- and more besides. Producer-star Warren Beatty, whose
long-cherished brainstorm the film was, is on to all the
implications of the story, including its metaphors for moderns,
and so are his creative associates.

    Screenwriter James Toback, who has sometimes tended to the
prolix and the pretentious, is all business here -- much of it
very funny business. The man writes dialogue as if it had not
gone out of style. Transforming the hearsay history of a
gangster's life into something shrewder than a mere morality
tale, yet more disciplined than a romantic celebration of outlaw
heroism, he keeps reminding us that back in Bugsy's day, the
mark of a good screenplay was great wordplay.

    Director Barry Levinson, who has been known to place a
sentimental scrim over the past, avoids the temptation here. He
envisions old-time Hollywood as sleek, hard and distracted by
its own overnight success. The whole town acts like an
overhandsome star -- rather like Bugsy's friend George Raft
(whom Joe Mantegna plays a little too kindly in the film) -- a
dumb guy who thinks his prosperity proves that he's smart.

    Not that Bugsy is in any sense a sociological tract. It
is, perhaps most entertainingly, a love story. Before he
conceived his grand passion for Las Vegas, Siegel conceived an
equally obsessional devotion to starlet-moll Virginia Hill
(Annette Bening), perhaps because she is the first woman capable
of asking him, before they make love for the first time, "Do you
always talk this much before you do it?" His chilling response
is, "I only talk this much before I kill someone." Her success
with him (she even manages to embezzle a couple of million from
his casino's building fund) is based entirely on her
willingness to risk his wrath, which means risking death. Bening
gives a remarkable performance, proposing the intriguing
possibility that a kept woman can also be a liberated woman. In
any case, she shares her fears and vulnerability only in a few
private moments with the camera, never with the besotted Bugsy.

    But good as she and everyone else in Bugsy is (mention
must be made of Harvey Keitel, Elliott Gould and Ben Kingsley
as assorted thugs and mugs), the picture belongs, in every
sense of the word, to Beatty. It is impossible to say whether,
as an actor, he is performing or behaving, though he obviously
sees something of Bugsy in himself. As Toback says, "He
combines an elegant and well-cultivated charm with a tensely
impacted psychosis. The role gave him a historical person
through whom he could express his wild extremes."

    As a producer, Beatty is quite aware that Bugsy is for him
what Las Vegas was for the character he plays: an obsession he
is determined to impose on an indifferent, not to say hostile,
world. He's been here before, with his first production, Bonnie
and Clyde (which, because it is an utterly unmoralistic
portrayal of interpenetrated charm, sexuality and monstrousness,
Bugsy most resembles), and with such subsequent singularities
as Shampoo, Reds and Dick Tracy. His track record is one of
aspiration -- and is marked by commercial successes that
startled the conventional wisdom.

    As Bugsy may too. For the moment, Hollywood is dubious. It
holds that the public doesn't want period pieces or gangster
films (look at The Godfather Part III and Billy Bathgate) and
may not want Warren Beatty, who at 54 is no longer the really
cute guy he once was. But the film is a commentary on the
conventions of the gangster genre, not a mindless repetition of
them. And Beatty is not a star appearing but an actor acting --
mercurially, hypnotically. Like the film, he is metaphorically
but ferociously at grips with American ambiguities: infamy as
a form of fame, violence as an aspect of the visionary, bold
greed as relief and corrective for our pious official
hypocrisies.

    Beatty knows Bugsy is a tough sell in this climate. He
recognizes that its best hope is critical endorsement, yet
glumly expects "moral disapproval" from some reviewers. "Critics
will say that Bugsy, like Bonnie and Clyde, makes the
reprehensible palatable." But, as he also says, "it's important
to break through this need to approve or disapprove of
character" -- especially so, one feels compelled to add, when
the content of almost every American movie is dictated by
demographics or congealed by political correctness. Our biggest
need right now is to be appalled, shaken up -- by movies, by our
public life in general. For a couple of riveting, dislocating
hours, Bugsy does just that.