Review of Bugsy (1991) by Greg S — 23 Feb 2011

It's Easy to Romanticize a Character Played by Warren Beatty.

See, the problem I'm having here is twofold. One, I cannot separate Warren Beatty from the character he plays. I watch him seducing Annette Bening, and I think of how she showed up to the Oscars one year enormously pregnant with one of their children. (That would be when she was nominated for [i]American Beauty[/i], I believe; she lost to Hilary Swank then and had better lose Sunday, too.) I also remember the amusing story Carrie Fisher tells about how he offered to "relieve her of her virginity" on the set of [i]Shampoo[/i]. (She says she told him that she'd never found it that much of a burden.) Really, I'm kind of surprised that he's still married, given the reputation he had before. I also note that he hasn't acted in ten years, so there's that. And then there's what I know about the real Benjamin Siegel. He was, shall we say, a bit less charming.

However, he is here played by Warren Beatty with all the debonair grace he can summon. The movie ignores the time he spent in New York, and we start with his trip to Los Angeles. It's supposed to last twelve days. Four out on the train, four in town, and four back on the train. However, there's something to the glitter of the film community--he is shown around by his good friend George Raft (Joe Mantegna)--which appeals to him. Oh, and he sees the lovely Virginia Hill (Bening) on the set of [i]Manhunt[/i], alas not itself available. Sure, he's married to Esta (Wendy Phillips) and has two kids (Stefanie Mason and Kimberly McCullough). And, you know, the mob thing. So, you know. He shuts down a "canker" casino in a dusty little town called Las Vegas, Nevada, and then decides he needs to sell Meyer Lansky (Sir Ben Kinglsey) and various others on building the Flamingo, an oasis where you can gamble and have illicit sex.

Oh, and he wants Countess di Frasso (Bebe Neuwirth) to ask her husband (Gian-Carlo Scandiuzzi) to set up an appointment for Ben with the count's best friend. Benito Mussolini. Because, and let's be very blunt about this, there was a reason for the "Bugsy" nickname. The man was not what you want to call Mr. Mental Health 1945. No, the real Benjamin Siegel wasn't as classy. He wasn't suave. He had a hair-trigger temper. We see him kill Harry Greenberg (Elliott Gould), and he feels kind of guilty about it, but you gotta do what you gotta do, right? We see him shoot someone else at the beginning of the movie, but it's such a nothing occurrence that I can't remember the guy's name or what he'd done to incur such wrath. He threatens a few other people, but we leave out such piddling details as the fact that he was a rapist. We're also supposed to get so enamoured of him that we forget how shabbily he's treating his family. Yes, he's ignoring his daughter's birthday to talk about the Flamingo, but He Has a Vision!

Oh, and Virginia Hill is stupid. We are shown that they have a "tempestuous" relationship, in that she at one point throws an ashtray at him and at another drives off, leaving Ben and Mickey Cohen (Harvey Keitel) stranded in the desert, but she seems genuinely shocked when Ben kills someone. I mean, she's heard about him before they meet. She knows who he is and what he does. All of that. And yet somehow the details never occur to her. She siphons money off a mob-financed building project, for heaven's sake! The FBI files available online suggest that the FBI believes he was responsible for thirty murders or more himself, and it apparently never occurred to her that one of the things those people were killed for was [i]stealing from the mob.[/i] She says she should have left Ben, should have never gotten involved with him in the first place. She's right. Honestly, even the Ben who appears in this movie isn't a man with whom you want to consider building a life. This is leaving aside the "already married" part, even.

Oh, it's a pretty enough movie, in that sort of Golden Age of Hollywood fashion. However, it's trying to trick you into believing that the characters involved led prettier lives. In fact, the film left me with the impression that she killed herself very shortly after he died, perhaps out of grief. Not true; she outlived him by nearly twenty years. Meyer Lansky essentially fails to appear for vast amounts of the story. The role of William Wilkerson in the creation of Las Vegas is not merely downplayed but ignored entirely. This Ben Siegel sees the potential and creates his oasis all of his own accord. He'll start right away, too--right after he gets back from Italy, where he's going to kill Mussolini. Which means that the timing is off as well. Siegel didn't even come onto the project until after the War was over. I'm also not convinced by his determination to kill Mussolini in the hopes of saving all those Jews. I certainly can't find anyone online telling the story, and it's too good not to.