Screen
Alleva, Richard
SCREEN ASSASSINATIONS 'BUGSY' & 'JFK' ugly has much to recommend it—electric acting, gleaming photography by Allan Daviau that charges the physical world of the film with the lurid...
...The last third of this nearly three-hour movie presents the trial of Clay Shaw...
...And to the sober, fiscally responsible gangsters who are Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel's associates, "bugsy" means unpredictable, uncontrollable, fiscally irresponsible...
...But Stone's idea of energizing a scene is to have New Orleans prosecutor Jim Garrison harangue a room while Stone cuts in 4,963 reaction shots of Garrison's admiring assistants...
...Then Siegel kills the man...
...The reason that the movie succeeds with me is that I found myself allowing that question mark to appear...
...That is an implication that Siegel cannot tolerate...
...SCREEN ASSASSINATIONS 'BUGSY' & 'JFK' ugly has much to recommend it—electric acting, gleaming photography by Allan Daviau that charges the physical world of the film with the lurid potentialities that the hero sees in it, a romantically sinister Ennio Morricone score, flexible direction by Barry Levinson that serves up scenes of violence, sensuality, comedy, and even domesticity with equal adroitness—but the movie will succeed or fail with each viewer to the extent that that viewer is gripped by the nature of the hero whose nickname gives the movie its title...
...Somehow, this act seems crazier than the house buying not because it is murderous but because it is an enactment of Siegel's vision of himself as a reasonable man exacting reasonable justice three bullets in the chest...
...Craziness, to them, is indicated by a willingness to invest in a project that has no precedent and guarantees no profit, namely Siegel's willingness to invest in a huge gambling enterprise called Las Vegas...
...But Siegel first buys some expensive shirts and offers them to his victim, explaining that the embezzler could have had these elegant shirts instead of "stealing the shirt off my back...
...When Garrison addresses the jury he tells them if they don't find Shaw guilty, they are, in effect, accepting the Warren Commission's findings, are keeping the real assassins from justice, and are helping to keep a fascist government in power...
...And Siegel has the base of operation he needs to conduct business...
...In any case, this movie shook me up...
...This movie is about a man who is crazy if his plans come to nothing, who is sane if his plans succeed...
...To catch his victim off guard...
...Why the shirts...
...For to be "bugsy" is to be insane and to be insane is to be possessed by v isions that have no basis in reality, while it is Siegel's pride, an artist's pride, to have a vision of what may become real...
...It's the best performance of Beatty's career...
...The movie's limited, exasperating, but undeniable triumph is this: it constantly demonstrates how tightly our views of sanity and insanity are tied to mere pragmatism...
...Rather, the viewer gets the sense that Siegel really had to demonstrate to his victim, with visual aides (the shirts), why he had to die...
...And wasn't the shirt demonstration at least an executioner's effort to make some human contact with his victim and therefore the only sane feature of an insane act...
...and is spending the huge sum of money with which the gangster has overpaid him...
...But, one scene later, Tibbett is comfortably ensconsed in the best hotel in L.A...
...Of course, "bugsy" means crazy...
...that attracts him, he immediately walks in and tries to buy it from its owner, the great opera singer Lawrence Tibbett...
...Compliments to Warren Beatty for a performance that counterpoints framequivering rage with eyeclouding doubt, comedy with menace, a lover's fondness with an efficient killer's unreachability...
...presidency...
...to dainty perfection by Ben Kingsley) to kill a man who has embezzled from the mob...
...To be called "bugsy" indicates that your visions are mere delusions and will never be realized...
...But in the almost fifty minutes of cinematic muckraking, not one point is made that clearly implicates Clay Shaw in the Kennedy assassination...
...Not necessary...
...The implications of that nickname are the substance of the film...
...As we soon see, Siegel can simply walk into the man's numbers operation and blow him away without opposition...
...If only Siegel had shot without talking, he would not seem so bugsy...
...RICHARD ALLEVA 18: 14 February 1992 Commonweal...
...Yet this is the filmmaker who dedicates JFK to all future generations who dare to seek out the truth...
...As sheer filmmaking, JFK is sheer kitsch...
...For instance, when Siegel sees a house in L.A...
...A grimmer example: Bugsy is sent by Meyer Lansky (played "I can understand violence, Gloria, but not senseless violence...
...Not one single point...
...When the putative villain, Clay Shaw, enters the present tense of the story (after having Commonweal 14 February 1992: 17 been established as a monster in the flashbacks), the camera is fixed first on the elegantly tailored lower half of his body, then pans up to his face...
...he must have the victim see the point of his own death...
...It is nothing of the kind...
...The whole movie tries to put a question mark after its title...
...Was the transaction crazy...
...Tibbett's immediate reaction, as Siegel opens a briefcase stuffed with money, is ours: this guy is crazy...
...But wait, isn't murderformoney itself the craziness...
...Earlier in the film, Garrison tells his aides that he doesn't know how Shaw figures in the murder—and he doesn't care...
...Las Vegas and Virginia are the immediate causes of Siegel's downfall and death...
...Compliments to James Toback, who has learned from his onetime mentor, Norman Mailer, how to keep his audience from too quickly applying the word "monster" to a doer of monstrous deeds...
...Given the current climate of public cynicism, disaffection from politics, and paranoia, I'm sure Stone's career will continue to flourish...
...The prosecutor, Garrison, and through him, Oliver Stone, use the case to attack the Warren Report, and this exposé is as unsettling as the many articles and TV documentaries that have rightly criticized the report...
...To Siegel himself the nickname is utterly abhorrent and he often hits people who address him by it...
...Robert Richardson is a fine cameraman, of course, and he skillfully distinguishes the present tense of this story from the flashbacks by using interesting gradations of black-and-white, gray-and-white, brown-and-white, and full color...
...Yeah, the L.B.J...
...Is Stone the last curving member of the SDS...
...Whether or not Shaw is guilty or innocent is of no interest to Garrison nor, apparently, to Stone...
...Craziness is also indicated by a willingness to trust a woman with money just because she happens to be your mistress, as Siegel is willing to trust Virginia Hill with the administration of the money that is financing Las Vegas...
...It's not enough for Siegel to kill...
...Oliver Stone has become the Joe McCarthy of the Left...
...This shot has been used by a thousand hacks to signal that the devil has just entered...
...Even the critics who have called attention to the way Oliver Stone has juggled facts with factoids in JFK have called his film a superb job of moviemaking...
Vol. 119 • February 1992 • No. 3
