Review: "Bugsy" (1991)

Recently I blogged about The Godfather Part II where the character Hyman Roth talks about his childhood pal Moe Green who invented the city of Las Vegas. In reality Hyman Roth was a gangster named Meyer Lanksy and his friend was Ben "Bugsy" Siegel, the mastermind behind the gambling mecca of America. Like Lansky, Siegel was a Jewish kid from Brooklyn who grew up to be one of the most feared and powerful gangsters of his day -- or ever. 

Bugsy was a killer and a visionary, a psychopath and a builder, a monster and a genius -- in many ways, the ultimate product of his hometown and country.

The 1991 movie Bugsy tells the story of the man's creation of Las Vegas. In the early 1940s, the powerful NYC mobster traveled to Los Angeles to take over the gambling rackets for his bosses in NYC, only to realize that next door in Nevada gambling was actually legal, and that an entire city and industry could be built around it. Bugsy's pursuit of this dream leads to his greatest professional triumph, something so much more than the life of crime and violence he had previously lived. But as his dream comes to fruition, his destruction comes with it. It's the story of triumph and tragedy, creation and death -- the American paradox that fuels our history.  

Warren Beatty, nearing the end of his leading man days, plays the title character, and a young Annette Benning, in one of her break-out roles (both as an actress and Beatty's future wife) plays Virginia Hill, Bugsy's movie-actress mistress and partner in creation of the Flamingo, the first Las Vegas hotel. The supporting cast is the real treat of this movie -- Harvey Keitel plays Siegel's one-time adversary-turned partner Mickey Cohen, and the absolutely brilliant Ben Kingsley plays Meyer Lansky in a career-best performance (with all due respect to Gandhi, both the man and the movie, this may be his best work). It was directed by Barry Levinson, coming off his great success with Rain Man, and this movie is beautifully directed and produced. Made almost 30 years ago, this is the kind of dark, brutal, mature, literate, deeply dramatic movie that the big studios used to make and don't anymore. It was, in many ways, the last of its kind. While not a great movie like Chinatown or The Godfather flicks, it's worth seeing. 

Bugsy is yet another in the unofficial Mr NYC canon of movies about New Yorkers far from home who either go on to greatest or ruin. This movie is really about both.