Bugsy (1991)

Bugsy a disapointment

I was disappointed by this DVD. Watching it, I got bored and just went on to other things. Sort of bothered by an apparent glorification of someone who really wasn't a very nice person. June 26, 2008

"One of the best American gangster movies ever made", you must be joking!

Somehow this gangster movie has eluded me for the past sixteen years until the other Sunday I acquired a DVD version as an Athens week-end newspaper giveaway which announced that it had a 13 minute cut restored in it. Which cut was restored? I do not know. Nor do I care, the film is boring and overlong anyway.

First let me itemise the better points of this work, which won't take very long. The cast is obviously top rate, the period costumes are dazzling, the cinematography is excellent and the background music is fairly good. For me these pluses just save the move while leaving it within millimetres of being an absolute failure. Indeed, in that sense it's rather like Bugsy's wet and dismal Christmas opening of his dream, The Flamingo Hotel and Casino, the first gambling palace in Las Vegas. An opening failure after the expenditure of vast sums of money and a fatal event for him which produced billions for his mobster assassins years afterwards.

The one love interest is with Virginia Hill, played excellently as his sluttish, albeit alluring, moll by Annette Bening who is good at playing naughty lady roles. We learn from a written epilogue at the end of the film that following her lover's predictable demise she eventually committed suicide in Austria. The only moral of Ben Siegel's death is "if you are a target don't stand reading a newspaper with your back to a curtain-less front window at ground level only yards from the street, or at least spend a few cents on bullet-proof glazing".

The story is a true one about the psychopath who dreamed up Las Vegas, but is dull and uninteresting and in watching the movie I finally realise what is meant when they say evil is banal. Ben Siegel was essentially both evil and banal and without any attraction or redeeming features. No amount of good film making and first class acting can conceal that fact. His imagination in having the first Mojave desert Casino built was even less creative than that of Billy Butlin, the British entrepreneur who developed the idea behind English holiday camps (all inclusive resorts) in the 1950s. One has to ask why did somebody bother to make a movie about him anyway? A good partly dramatised documentary would have done the job?

I had been led by rave reviews to expect a much better movie. Something in the nature of the classic gangster movies I like such as notably The Godfather, Goodfellas, Casino, A Bronx Tale and even the Woody Allen melodrama Bullets over Broadway. There is something comic about the stock Sicilian or Calabrian gangsters that appeals to me, from the point of view of entertainment. In the classic gangster movies I have enjoyed there has been always been a certain amount of humour and sense that has offset the banality of it all. The lead gangsters are usually cerebral, not psychos, just cold- blooded crooked businessmen who treat their own right and value loyalty. There may be psychopaths in such mostly fictional films, sometimes played by Joe Pesci, but are secondary roles and even they are often funny despite themselves. There is little humour in Bugsy and no suspense.I sat down and watched 144 minutes of the movie in three sessions. The title might well have been The Fall of a Psychopath. I am really glad I didn't buy a theatre ticket for a work so long, dull and utterly boring. In most gangster films the mobster chiefs get a flunkey do the dirty violent work. However, Ben Siegel himself, as portrayed by an aging Warren Beatty, seems to enjoy murder for its own sake and gets rid of his frustrations by brutally beating men up at the slightest excuse while sheepishly accepting objects hurled at him by his sluttish girl friend. Bugsy is a mean sort of character whose life seems completely pointless but is street wise enough to get off a murder charge. He is an entirely soulless person who will do anything to get what he wants from bribery to murder. Strangely enough one gets the strong impression towards the end of the movie that the producers really want the audience to empathise with Bugsy and his whore. I turned the DVD player off with nary a misty eye. As portrayed Siegel deserved his sticky end. One of the most unsympathetic charmless characters I have ever seen on the screen without any redeeming features.

As far as Hollywood movies were concerned the Kuwait War year 1991 was only notable for production of two pleasant melodramas, Fried Green Tomatoes and Frankie and Johnnie. The Bugsy movie was nominated for a whole array of undeserved academy awards, losing to Silence of the Lambs, another dismal movie. However, Bugsy deservedly succeeded in winning Oscars for its art, costume and music.

May 7, 2008

visionary gangster

As a gangster movie buff, I watched this film with pleasure and some interest. While the story is certainly compelling - Siegel is pursuing power and achievement more than money - there is nothing about it that stood out for me. Sure, he was the kind of leader who built empires, a brutal sociopath with a knack for seeking the glitziest things in life, from his women to business deals that involved movie stars. Then his vision paid off in Las Vegas, surely one of the most spectacular entertainment investments in history. But this film simply lacked some spark for me. Perhaps I am trying to find something as good as or better than Coppola's Godfather series, and this film did not reach that mark for me.

Recommended. It is good, if not quite great. March 11, 2008

excellent ganster movie

This is a good period movie
about Bugsy and how he helped
put Las Vegas on the map. I
recommend it. December 30, 2007

Chick Flick Wears a Gangster Film's Stripes

"Bugsy," 1991, a biographical crime drama nominated for ten Academy Awards, sure looks and sounds like a gangster film. It was nominated for Best Film in 1991, received the most Oscar nominations that year, in fact, and actually won two Oscars. (It lost Best Picture to "Silence of the Lambs," as Warren Beatty, who co-produced and turned in one of his strongest performances as the title character, lost Best Actor to Anthony Hopkins in "Silence.") Anyway, it earned another seven miscellaneous awards, and was nominated for twenty more: it's widely considered one of the best movies of the 1990's. As written by James Toback, directed by Barry Levinson, and scored by Ennio Morricone, it's highly evocative of its era, and neonoir Los Angeles.

Warren Beatty fully inhabits the title role: Benjamin Siegel, famous 1930's/'40's Jewish mobster, whom you didn't dare call Bugsy to his face. The man was handsome enough ( played by Beatty, after all), to dream of a Hollywood career for himself after taking up LA residence. He was unbalanced enough to imagine he could organize a plot to kill Italian World War II Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini from LA, and dreamer enough to create Las Vegas from the desert, but not organized enough to bring it in on budget, which proved his undoing. His rage, and violence when aroused, were also plenty scary enough.

Beatty is ably supported, as to the underworld, by Harvey Keitel, turning in a meaty, Oscar-nominated performance as feared Jewish LA mobster Mickey Cohen; and Ben Kingsley, doing his incomparable menacing best as Jewish underworld figure Meyer Lansky. Elliott Gould adds luster to his career as hapless Hary Greenberg, who gambled above his head, and socialized above it too. Joe Mantegna fails to bring much to his role as George Raft, gangster movie star of the 1930's and '40's, who was a known associate of Siegel's. Babe Neuwirth turns up in a small role as an Italian countess, one of the many women Siegel could effortlessly manipulate. The costumes call up the glamour of the age; the cinematography gives us LA at its most noir, all those rainy nights, and in color, too.

And then, the picture introduced to a larger audience Annette Bening, playing the ravishing, potty-mouthed, long-legged Hollywood starlet of easy morals, Virginia Hill, as it introduced Beatty and Bening. (Hill had been nicknamed the flamingo for those long, long legs: Siegel named his Vegas hotel, the city's first, after her: The Flamingo.) Anyone can see these two beautiful people, Beatty and Bening, falling in love onscreen: they would marry offscreen. They are so obviously in love, so hot hot hot, they give the movie an emotional kick not generally found in gangster pictures. They actually create a chick flick at its heart.

October 5, 2007

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