Warren Beatty is impeccable as 1940s New York-based gangster Ben Siegel (don't call him Bugsy!) who infiltrated Hollywood in its golden era, making friends with celebrities, entering into an alliance with adversary Mickey Cohen, dreaming up a glamorous, heroic life for himself while falling madly in love with volatile starlet Virginia Hill. A car-trip to Nevada to check out a mobster-run casino gave Siegel his biggest epiphany: a gambling palace in the desert called the Flamingo, which he believed would become a vacation hot-spot for the high-rollers of the world. This may be director Barry Levinson's most accomplished picture yet; it does feel semi-soft and overly glossy in the beginning but, with many thanks to James Toback's unflinching and hard-boiled screenplay, the movie flows effortlessly along, introducing (and sometimes dispatching with) various colorful figures from gangland history with aplomb. Annette Bening is a bit uneven as Hill (particularly in a later prison sequence), but Harvey Keitel is an amazingly gentleman-like Cohen, Ben Kingsley a marvelously low-keyed Meyer Lansky, and Elliott Gould sympathetic as stoolie Harry Greenberg. What initially looks like a romanticized portrait actually bristles with anger and bloodletting, yet Siegel (as played by Beatty) remains an affable guy. He's vain, he's jealous, he's hot-tempered, he's unforgiving--and yet he's a pushover for loyal friends, a softy for his estranged family in Scarsdale, a lover of big, impossible dreams. Levinson sweeps the audience up in this glittering tale, which is a lot more than just nostalgia and dazzle. It's the story of a man whose dreams were too big for his own era. *** from ****
Review of Bugsy
