Bugsy

            This week we’re going to look at a present-day gangster movie—Bugsy—which came out in 1991 and did well both critically and at the box office. It was directed by Barry Levinson, a sometimes very-talented filmmaker, and written by James Toback, whose projects have been uniformly strange but often interesting. And maybe the biggest presence is Warren Beatty, who takes the extremely meaty central role and was a co-producer.

            Bugsy tells the story of famous gangster Bugsy Siegel, during World War II one of the three kingpins of the New York underworld along with Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano. Siegel’s story has popped up from time to time in the margins of other gangster movies—notably The Godfather—but the team of Levinson, Toback and Beatty give it an outing that transforms it into a big, big movie. At 135 minutes the film is long, though not by the standards of such mammoth epics as the Godfather films or the complete version of Once Upon a Time in America. It is also lush, expansive and highly polished. At different times it pursues comedy, sweeping romance, and even tragedy—and, as this description would suggest, its ultimate ambition is to be an epic.

            Bugsy Siegel’s claim to fame in the mythology of gangster narratives is that he had the imagination to see that Nevada gambling resorts were the wave of the future, but that his swaggering plans went too far over budget for him ever to profit by them. His nickname, which he hates, signifies craziness of course, and labels him as a man whose eccentricities could range from charming spontaneity to psychotic rage, and also—from this movie’s point of view—as a romantic visionary creator. The Bennie Siegel we see here is a refreshing, charismatic, big-thinking whirlwind of energy who always follows his impulses forcefully and immediately, no matter how extravagant they are. A happy family man, he invests as much time and effort in chasing and seducing women as in doing business. His big-hearted enthusiasm eventually leads him to try to be a solid husband and father while simultaneously conducting the Love Affair of the Century with the equally impulsive and feisty Virginia Hill. Meanwhile he is also trying to balance being a functioning gangster businessman with his grandiose aims to establish an oasis of human dreams in the desert at Las Vegas. Emphatically he’s not in it for the money; money is something that’s beneath him. He rises above ordinary gangsters as he rises above ordinary men, by the sweep and originality of his life force. Great lover, great visionary businessman, great guy—this Bugsy Siegel is some kind of a hero. Of course this freedom and confidence that he can do anything and everything all at once is impossible, it can’t last, and so Benny Siegel has to fall in the end. Really he’s too good for the world.

            But wait a minute. Isn’t this guy a gangster, that is a guy who makes his living by extortion and murder? And what about his friends, Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano? Luciano emerges here as something of a thug, but Lansky, Siegel’s boyhood friend and the only one of the bosses who understands and loves him, is really extremely nice, and is played with saintlike gentleness and wisdom by Ben Kingsley. Likewise Virginia Hill, whose character even in this movie won’t stand a lot of scrutiny, is presented as a grand amour, and the inconsistencies of her actions are simply ignored in a sweep of passion. Why is the movie trying to make silk purses our of these sows’ ears? If you want to glorify a figure of vision and spontaneity and big emotions, why pick a gangster up to his knees in blood? And if you want to glorify an inspiring visionary entrepreneur, why pick on the man who invented Las Vegas, of all horrifying places? Don’t you think that’s extremely odd?

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            I want to go back to the questions I was asking before the movie. Why pick a gangster to be this heroic, romantic, in fact really admirable, figure? In the second Godfather film, Bugsy Siegel is sort of represented in the character of Moe Green, and in that movie there is nothing attractive or heroic about him at all. While you’re watching the movie Bugsy the whole process of presenting Siegel in this glamorous light seems kind of natural. True, he shoots people sometimes. True, he flies into uncontrollable rages sometimes. But really, he only shoots people when he has to. And really, his uncontrollable rages aren’t very frequent, and the people he yells at kind of deserve it, and lots of times he really does struggle to keep his temper under control.

            I still want to ask, though, why bring in the killings and the rages if you’re going to downplay and excuse them? I certainly don’t want to hear anything about what the real Bugsy Siegel did or didn’t do, and how the movie is bound by his historical real life. If Warren Beatty in this movie is anything like a real gangster, Bugsy Siegel or otherwise, then I’m Alfred Hitchcock. In effect the movie wants Bugsy Siegel to be a gangster without him being a gangster, or at least without the movie or the character having to suffer any loss in sympathy because of his gangsterly behaviour.

            Of course you can say that gangsters have had a charismatic public appeal ever since they first appeared during the Twenties, when Al Capone was once voted one of the Ten Most Popular Men in America. However sordid or ugly their actual deeds and personalities, gangsters represent a principal of liberty of action, a potentially heroic refusal to compromise with a notion of true existential freedom unfettered by laws and conventions. And gangster activity also represents free enterprise—effective competition in a competitive society where the strong and able prosper and the weak are losers. The equation of criminal activity with business activity is a constant feature of gangster movies throughout the whole history of the genre, and is maybe best captured in The Godfather’s description of good business transactions: making somebody an offer he can’t refuse.

            So the gangster is simply one who competes freely and effectively. But in reducing the precarious and problematic balance of competition and survival to the lowest common denominator of pulling a gun on somebody (or in Bugsy’s case screaming at them uncontrollably for ten minutes), the gangster has clearly crossed the line. In most gangster movies, the gangster hero doesn’t survive. He has to die at the end because he has simplified things too much, he has lived with too much existential freedom. He has exposed the fiction that individuals are truly free in American society: an individual can only be truly free by ignoring the law and the freedom of others. And he’s also exposed the fiction that successful individuals can compete without anybody getting hurt: gangster enterprise dramatises with striking clarity the process of domination, the kill-or-be-killed basis, of competition. By literalising the basic conditions of freedom, success and failure in this way, the gangster is a liberating figure for viewers. But he also becomes a sacrificial victim of the system which he has understood too well. He dies, as it were, for our sins—because we have identified with his too-aggressive, too-destructive philosophy.

            Another thing. When they first appeared in movies in the early 1930s, gangsters were a real, contemporary phenomenon. Now the period gangster is a kind of idealized fantasy figure. Up-to-date criminals are almost never presented in this way. Criminals in the 90s are scumbags to be disposed of by action-heroes. Can you imagine a contemporary drug boss, prostitution organizer or money-laundering casino owner as any kind of movie hero at all, let alone the visionary martyr and great romantic soul that Bugsy gives us? But with a period setting and costumes, and appearing as historical gangster figures whose names are so well known that they are almost revered, they can achieve a mythic stature. Nostalgia for an America before Vietnam and social fragmentation, nostalgia for a lost wholeness and purpose, suffuses almost all period movies, whether there’s any grain of historical justification for it or not. Here the gorgeous setting, the lovely cars and clothes, the sumptuous and gorgeously tuneful music, are all tokens of a beautiful life that no longer exists. Gangsters therefore live in a kind of Golden Age, like Edwardian ladies and gentlemen in a Masterpiece Theatre series, and they take on a size and significance that are in direct proportion to the confusion and purposelessness we may perceive in our own world.

            Nevertheless, Bugsy is particularly amazing in its canonization of a character whom, as I suggested before, we wouldn’t be interested in at all if he weren’t a criminal. In its final scenes, particularly the big romantic farewell on the runway in the rain, the movie is straining so hard it becomes almost incoherent. After all even in this ultra-sanitized version, Bennie is absolutely the victim of his own extravagance and self-indulgence and stupidity, while Virginia is somebody who stole $2 million from him and doesn’t have any kind of explanation. The obsessive need to convert these people into grand heroic and romantic figures gets really visible here. And the notion that the fantastic city of dreams Bennie carries as his great ideal, and for which he sacrifices his life, is present-day Las Vegas—and that this was a dream worth dying for—is frankly nauseating.

            But Bugsy is still a really interesting movie, even a good movie. I would say that it’s really interesting in part because of these signs of strain. Our attraction to this romanticized gangster figure reveals our own neurosis, our own desire for a coherence that is so impossible that it not only escapes us in our lives but is only achievable even in this fiction through a process of gross distortion. Bugsy throws itself into this process of distortion with great energy and technical skill. So it’s a good gangster movie and a desperate lie all at the same time.