The original Bugsy

A couple of months back, TCM ran the biopic Bugsy, about gangster Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel and his ultimate desire to build a new kind of gambling mecca in the desert of Las Vegas. It's a movie that first came out when I was in college, so I was too busy doing other things to see much in the way of new movies, with the result that I'd never seen it in the 30-plus years since. So with that in mind, I recorded it in order that I'd finally be able to watch it.

Warren Beatty plays Bugsy Siegel, part of the New York Jewish Mafia who has the movie opens up is presented as someone apparently trying to overcome his class upbringing, at least as evidenced by his practicing his diction. (That, and his hatred of the "Bugsy" nickname.) He's sent out to Los Angeles to deal with a gangster who stands accused of skimming money from the syndicate. There, Bugsy is met by his old friend George Raft (Joe Mantegna), who of course had known the old New York mobsters before decamping to Hollywood to become an actor himself. Siegel gets the idea that Hollywood might be a bigger racket than everything he'd been doing in New York, and likes the idea of staying out west, buying a house from opera star with Hollywood pretensions Lawrence Tibbett.

George Raft is busy making the movie Manpower, and it's on the set of that movie that Siegel meets a would-be actress who also had ties to the Mob, Virginia Hill (Annette Bening). Siegel is taken with her beauty, and the two start a torrid affair. Meanwhile, business hits some snags for Siegel when Mickey Cohen (Harvey Keitel) robs the outfit. Siegel realizes, however, that Cohen is smart, and gets Cohen to go in with him.

One day, Siegel goes off on business, that takes him through the sleepy desert city of Las Vegas. Gambling was already legal in Nevada, but there was mostly small-time gambling in Vegas at the time. However, seeing the possibilities of legal gambling, and the possibility of doing something more respectable, Siegel gets the idea of building a resort out in the desert that, like Palm Springs, would be a place for people to get away from it all with an almost always sunny climate. Only, this place would have legal gambling in addition to resort stuff.

That resort would eventually become the Flamingo, and at the time Siegel conceived it, he planned on spending a million bucks building it, quite a sum of money just as World War II was ending. But thanks to various difficulties and Siegel's consistent desire to make the Flamingo the best resort around, the project suffers from severe cost overruns. The rest of the mafia bosses get together, believing that Siegel has embezzled a bunch of money from them in order to fund the construction of the Flamingo.

The story of Bugsy as presented is done fairly well, with strong performances from Beatty and Bening. However, since a good portion of the story has Siegel out in Hollywood and dealing with real Hollywood figures, all of us who are fans of old movies are going to spot a bunch of continuity errors. This is almost always the case in Hollywood biopics, since they need to compress the action to fit within a reasonable running time, but when the subject of the biography is tangent to something you know a bit more about (in this case classic film), the errors can be a bit more jarring.

Still, that doesn't take enough away from the movie to make it enjoyable. And for "regular" people who don't know so much about old Hollywood, some of the errors should be less notable (although since a good portion of the action is during World War II, that's another area where errors can be jarring). If you haven't seen it before, Bugsy is definitely worth a watch.