Cops and Robber
PODHORETZ, JOHN
Cops and Robber ‘American Gangster’ and the underside of 1970s New York. BY JOHN PODHORETZ American Gangster Directed by Ridley Scott Frank Lucas, the title character of American Gangster, is...
...The visually meticulous Ridley Scott—whose credits include Alien, Blade Runner, and Gladiator—has long seemed the polar opposite of fast-working street-level directors like Sidney Lumet, whose Serpico and Prince of the City are the clear antecedents for American Gangster’s portrait of cops gone bad and the good cops who suffer because of the corruption of their colleagues...
...The movie that seems to have had the most infl uence on Scott and screenwriter Steven Zaillian is an uncompromisingly tough and ugly B-picture from 1972 called Across 110th Street, whose classic theme song by Bobby Womack makes a welcome appearance on American Gangster’s soundtrack...
...One night, and only one night, Lucas fails to heed his own advice...
...Because of his showy gear and ringside seats, Lucas captures the attention of two police offi cers working in the area of drug enforcement...
...They are wedded to the idea that organized crime is the exclusive province of Italians, and that any black crook must be in the Mafi a’s employ...
...Washington’s steely strength is beautifully complemented by the softspoken doggedness of Russell Crowe, himself fresh from committing hairtrigger acts of violence in 3:10 to Yuma as brutal as the ones we see here from Frank Lucas...
...A Harlem kingpin in the late 1960s and early ’70s, Lucas (Denzel Washington) dresses formally in quiet suits and ties, adheres to a rigorous schedule, provides stable employment for his family, is a hero in his neighborhood for providing community services, and lives with his mother...
...John Podhoretz is THE WEEKLY STANDARD’s movie critic...
...He upbraids one of his brothers for tricking himself out like a pimp at a Harlem nightclub because a successful and powerful man does not need to stand out...
...His moment of fl ashy behavior has numbered his own days, and he knows it...
...Lucas was decades younger at the time than Denzel Washington is now, and the real Lucas was exactly the kind of fl amboyant player the Lucas of American Gangster so detests...
...Lucas prizes his low profi le...
...American Gangster is, at times, muddled and overstuffed...
...Beautifully detailed and masterfully acted, American Gangster is a thrilling throwback to the grungy, grimy, morally ambiguous New York crime movies of the 1970s, when revelations of police corruption seemed to offer some explanation for the city’s rapid decline into a state of nature: The good guys are working for the bad guys...
...Still, American Gangster pulses with life...
...It is never made clear what antidrug agency Crowe’s Richie Roberts is working for—and in the movie’s concluding scenes, Roberts suddenly transforms from a police detective into a district attorney without any explanation ever being given of the change in his circumstances...
...Lucas has become the most successful heroin dealer in New York, and is entirely invisible to the authorities...
...But it won’t be Trupo who brings Lucas down...
...He has just proposed to his girlfriend, Miss Puerto Rico, and she has presented him with a $50,000 chinchilla coat and hat to wear to the championship boxing match between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier...
...BY JOHN PODHORETZ American Gangster Directed by Ridley Scott Frank Lucas, the title character of American Gangster, is a precise and controlled man...
...Crowe does another of his peerless vanishing acts into the part of a working-class Jewish boy from New Jersey who isn’t entirely sure why he is incorruptible...
...It doesn’t have a boring or tedious moment during its two-andahalf hours, and when you’re not watching Denzel Washington, you’re watching Russell Crowe...
...That is the same story Scott and Zaillian tell in American Gangster, which is a fi ctionalized portrait of an actual American gangster—a man named Frank Lucas who was, indeed, an importer and distributor of an exceptionally potent form of heroin...
...American Gangster is a very, very good movie, but it is in every way an inferior stepchild to the two greatest American gangster movies, which also happen to be the two greatest American movies and, what’s more, the two greatest movies from any nation, ever...
...Lucas arrives at his home, goes to his closet, and in front of his stricken wife, throws the chinchilla coat into the fi re...
...You can’t, in all honesty, ask for much more from a movie...
...And it was unwise for the creative team here to give Washington a couple of moments that are little more than plagiarized versions of bits in the two Godfather movies—as when Lucas suddenly fl ares up and screams about someone “shooting at my wife” in a patent replica of Michael Corleone’s “in my home, in my bedroom, where my wife sleeps and my children come and play with their toys” rant in The Godfather: Part II...
...There are so many speaking parts fi lled by so many actors wearing so much 1970s facial hair that it is nearly impossible to keep track of just who anybody is...
...But Washington, in collaboration with Scott and Zaillian, has come up with such an interesting character here that it hardly matters...
...Scott, whose last two fi lms were the execrable Kingdom of Heaven and the unwatchable A Good Year, has found new life at the age of 70 by looking to the looser and more down-to-earth work of Lumet and others...
...The other is Trupo (Josh Brolin), a demonically dirty New York City cop who follows Lucas’s limousine after his wedding, pulls it over and demands $10,000 a week in payoffs...
...One is Richie Roberts (Russell Crowe), a Newark cop whose private life is as sloppy as Lucas’s is disciplined but who won’t take an illicit cent...
...In Across 110th Street, vicious cops led by Anthony Quinn, and soft Mafi a scions led by Tony Franciosa, fi nd themselves being challenged and superseded by a surging black underworld they cannot penetrate or control...
Vol. 13 • November 2007 • No. 8
