TIME: Almanac 1995

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<text id=91TT2735> <title> Dec. 09, 1991: A Killer Goes to Hollywood </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1991 Dec. 09, 1991 One Nation, Under God </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> CINEMA, Page 90 A Killer Goes to Hollywood </hdr><body> 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. </body></article> </text>