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Rating:  -
This is a good period movie
about Bugsy and how he helped
put Las Vegas on the map. I
recommend it.
Rating: -
"Bugsy," 1991, a biographical crime drama nominated for ten Academy Awards, sure looks and sounds like a gangster film. It was nominated for Best Film in 1991, received the most Oscar nominations that year, in fact, and actually won two Oscars. (It lost Best Picture to "Silence of the Lambs," as Warren Beatty, who co-produced and turned in one of his strongest performances as the title character, lost Best Actor to Anthony Hopkins in "Silence.") Anyway, it earned another seven miscellaneous awards, and was nominated for twenty more: it's widely considered one of the best movies of the 1990's. As written by James Toback, directed by Barry Levinson, and scored by Ennio Morricone, it's highly evocative of its era, and neonoir Los Angeles.
Warren Beatty fully inhabits the title role: Benjamin Siegel, famous 1930's/'40's Jewish mobster, whom you didn't dare call Bugsy to his face. The man was handsome enough ( played by Beatty, after all), to dream of a Hollywood career for himself after taking up LA residence. He was unbalanced enough to imagine he could organize a plot to kill Italian World War II Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini from LA, and dreamer enough to create Las Vegas from the desert, but not organized enough to bring it in on budget, which proved his undoing. His rage, and violence when aroused, were also plenty scary enough.
Beatty is ably supported, as to the underworld, by Harvey Keitel, turning in a meaty, Oscar-nominated performance as feared Jewish LA mobster Mickey Cohen; and Ben Kingsley, doing his incomparable menacing best as Jewish underworld figure Meyer Lansky. Elliott Gould adds luster to his career as hapless Hary Greenberg, who gambled above his head, and socialized above it too. Joe Mantegna fails to bring much to his role as George Raft, gangster movie star of the 1930's and '40's, who was a known associate of Siegel's. Babe Neuwirth turns up in a small role as an Italian countess, one of the many women Siegel could effortlessly manipulate. The costumes call up the glamour of the age; the cinematography gives us LA at its most noir, all those rainy nights, and in color, too.
And then, the picture introduced to a larger audience Annette Bening, playing the ravishing, potty-mouthed, long-legged Hollywood starlet of easy morals, Virginia Hill, as it introduced Beatty and Bening. (Hill had been nicknamed the flamingo for those long, long legs: Siegel named his Vegas hotel, the city's first, after her: The Flamingo.) Anyone can see these two beautiful people, Beatty and Bening, falling in love onscreen: they would marry offscreen. They are so obviously in love, so hot hot hot, they give the movie an emotional kick not generally found in gangster pictures. They actually create a chick flick at its heart.
Rating:  -
I never really thought or cared about how Las Vegas was started. Well...I now know!
BUGSY is a slick, lavish and eye-catching film that oozes director
Barry Levinson. This is a real treat for the senses.The attention to the most minute detail is a hallmark of Levinson's work.
Beatty and Bening are not favorites of mine.I personally hated the characters they portrayed in Ben Siegel and Virginia Hill.I hated what these characters did to others and to themselves. I am not a fan of MOB movies and in fact usually dislike them....but I liked this film.Why? Barry Levinson, that's why.He made this film work for me. This film is elegantly made...set design, cinematography, soundtrack etc.Sometimes you can detest the characters and feel nothing for them (hence the 4 stars!), but in the right hands anything can be made enjoyable!
Rating:  -
warren beatty indulged himself yet again (tho not as severely as in "dick tracy") in this overblown biopic of gangster bugsy siegel, whose fascination with celebrity led to his virtual one-man founding of las vegas as a gambling and entertainment mecca, and eventually to his murder by the mob once he grew too big for his britches. yet, in a movie paying homage to a man of excess, it is the excess which draws us in. the garishness works here; its a pity that theres no depth -- but then again, in a tribute to las vegas, maybe thats what director barry levinson was aiming for.
Rating: -
It was a good movie, it fits well among these types of crime films mixing fact with fiction. The extended version adds to the interest.
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