She’s Young, They’re in Love, and He Kills People

Yes, as a matter of fact, it did take me a while to catch up with BUGSY, now that you mention it. Probably being disgusted by DICK TRACY, a bloated waste with pretty colours, put me off going to see this. But as always with a Warren Beatty joint, top talent is involved. The director here isn’t WB himself but Barry Levinson, who has made some fine films, but maybe not this one.

My main observation is not, I think, an original one — Beatty somehow can’t suggest the psychopathic rage part that gives Ben Siegel his nickname and the film its title, which is a fairly big problem if you think about it.

What surprised me, during Beatty’s biggest tantrum, was an odd cut where his anger goes from about a 7 to a 10 with no transition and no motivation. Thereby making it clear that two takes, featuring different levels of performance, have been spliced together, maybe to try for a jarring, sudden escalation? Maybe hoping that this disjunction would make Warren scarier? I mean, he’s doing a decent job of looking angry, and if you were in a room with a guy that angry you’d maybe feel a little sick, but the problem is Harvey Keitel is in this film and Ben Kingsley is in this film and if Levinson asked either of them to do what Warren’s FORCING himself to try to do here, the key grip would soil himself in terror. We have seen scary actors. If we haven’t, we might be convinced by Warren.

In Levinson on Levinson, the director talks about how Bugsy needed to be a romantic lead as well as a vicious killer — obviously, Beatty can do the romantic stuff no problem. The trouble was, they needed BOTH. I can’t really think of anyone who was around at the time who would have been better.

Beatty is romantic partly because he has Annette Bening to be romantic with. She plays Virginia Hill, also the subject of a seventies TV movie where Dyan Cannon played her. Harvey Keitel was in that too, funnily enough.

The other big filmmaking fail — well, the film has several goddamn MONTAGES, the point of which I do not see, and whenever a period movie resorts to montages to get from one point of a disarticulated story to another, I feel somebody’s not done their screenwriting work — but the other thing is the ending.

Bugsy alone.

This ties in to the best bit, actually, Bugsy’s Damascene vision of the Flamingo Hotel. I tend to feel like Warren is buying up all the toys when he hires people like Storaro to shoot and Morricone to score… in fairness, BULWORTH is an absolutely gorgeous showcase for Storaro’s work and the maestro does great work here… but the great Morricone wasn’t really NEEDED for BULWORTH and he’s probably not needed here. Normally, if you hire Morricone and your lead has an ecstatic vision of an unbuilt hotel, you turn the composer loose and get something amazing. What they do here is impressively different.

Of course, Storaro gives us some great desert photography. But the sound design, by Richard Beggs, does the rest. It’s this distant echoing hubbub — like an auditory leak from the future. It comes from far away, probably from approximately our time. Or maybe we can only hear it dimly because it’s coming from inside Siegel’s head, which is only semi-porous as they prove at the end with bullets. Anyway, it’s really wonderful, and arguably better than what you’d get from the mighty Morricone because it’s NEW.

Anyway, the other fail: big pull-back from Annette Bening after she gets the news of Bugsy’s death, and pan off onto darkness. Then… nothing. Some TEXT, telling the movie’s version of what happened next — a version which is factually unfounded, as far as I can tell. Then a nothing shot of modern Vegas as the credits whiz upwards.

No good at all. What Fiona and I both expected, as the shot panned from Bening in her billowing gown, was the lights of modern Vegas coming on bit by bit in the darkness. That’s what the whole film has been leading up to, and certainly seems like what that shot is designed to lead up to. It’d have to be some kind of FX shot, sure. Something out of ONE FROM THE HEART. And maybe the idea is corny. But corny is better than disappointing, right? Usually. I mean, if the movie wasn’t so shamelessly romanticized then maybe it could afford to end with some kind of anticlimax. What do I mean by shamelessly romanticized? Well, Virginia Hill wasn’t at the Flamingo because she unexpectedly left for Paris, making some suspect she was tipped off about her boyfriend’s hit job — but there’s worse — we earlier see a witness being sent off on a nice holiday so he can’t testify against Bugs — two real witnesses were in fact whacked. To accuse them of taking bribes rather than bullets definitely falls into the category of insulting the dead.

Of course, BONNIE AND CLYDE was rose-tinted too. But that 100% worked. Does that excuse it? I’m not 100% sure. But when I watch that film, I 100% forget to worry about it.

The Shadowcast #2: Midterm Mayhem

The second edition of our podcast is here! Listen to Fiona and I plus Momo the podcat discussing US political satires from 1997 and 1998 — MAD CITY, WAG THE DOG, PRIMARY COLORS and, best of all, Mr. Warren Beatty’s extraordinary BULWORTH.

Here’s the link.

And the feed.

Enjoy! Tell your friends! Vote!

Indoor Derricks

The miniature indoor oil derrick was a short-lived design fad, but you can see examples in WRITTEN ON THE WIND — the late Dorothy Malone (above) keeps hers as a kind of phallic symbol and a memento of dear dead daddy (above above) — and SPLENDOR IN THE GRASS, where father Pat Hingle keeps a model of the derrick he fell from, resulting in his limp — in reality, poor Pat got it falling down an elevator shaft, fracturing his skull, hip, wrist, half his ribs, and his leg in three places. Ouch.

Worse, it cost him the lead in ELMER GANTRY.

I like the idea of his character keeping a model of the near-fatal derrick as a kind of trophy. Hingle plays his character as the kind of man who would do that — a roaring bully-boy, a proto-Nolte, communicating in a brutish semaphore of arm-punching and back-slapping.

His screen son, Warren Beatty, keeps a much smaller derrick in his bedroom.

We just watched SPLENDOR for the first time — I’m still way behind on Kazan. It’s pretty great, even if the story is barely a sentence-worth. It has emotion, star power, sharp observation, beautiful photography and design, brilliant casting down to the smallest role — Godfrey Cambridge plays a chauffeur in one shot… we keep cutting to Sandy Dennis, barely more than an extra…

It also has a real sense of period. Natalie Wood even does period-specific gestures, like that semi-circular wave, palm out, close to the face, that you see in ’20s movies. It’s all a great contrast to INSIDE DAISY CLOVER’S shunning of period costume.