To the list of tragic American Dreamers, people who martyred themselves for visions that stubbornly refused realization while they lived -- one thinks of rocket scientist Robert Goddard and car manufacturer Preston Tucker -- it seems we must now add the name of Benjamin Siegel. His great notion was the reinvention of Las Vegas, converting it from a sleepy cow town into a gaudy pleasure dome where everything that was illicit elsewhere in the puritanical U.S. of a half-century ago was openly available on a gloriously legal basis.
This was, to be sure, a dubious, not to say tacky, achievement. But it was also psychically and financially a potent one. For Ben was right: America needed Las Vegas without knowing it did.
That he died prematurely, of an overdose of .30-cal. bullets fired into him at the behest of business associates impatient with the slow return on their ; investment in his dream, is poignant. And ironic as well. Because before Siegel got around to reinventing Las Vegas, his most important project was reinventing himself. Far better known in the press and gossip of his glory days, the 1940s, as "Bugsy," he was perhaps the most famous mobster of his era. Not that he liked his colorful sobriquet (he tended to punch out people who used it in his presence) or his public identification as a hood (his preference was "sportsman").
He was, as well, a careful dresser, an elocution student struggling to improve his diction and a citizen eager to put his hit man's skill to patriotic use; he fondly nurtured a plan to assassinate Mussolini. Above all, he was bedazzled by the mutual admiration that developed between him and the movie stars and moguls he met after moving to Los Angeles to oversee his syndicate's West Coast gambling interests. That he was subject to outbursts of violently sociopathic, possibly psychopathic, rage in no way damaged his self- estimation and probably enhanced his glamour in Hollywood's eyes. In a town that likes to talk tough, an authentic tough guy has star quality.
It may be that the best thing about Bugsy, the elegantly made, wickedly perverse and very smart new movie about the last years of Siegel's life, is that you don't have to impose any of these interpretations on it. Indeed, it suggests most of them -- and more besides. Producer-star Warren Beatty, whose long-cherished brainstorm the film was, is on to all the implications of the story, including its metaphors for moderns, and so are his creative associates.
Screenwriter James Toback, who has sometimes tended to the prolix and the pretentious, is all business here -- much of it very funny business. The man writes dialogue as if it had not gone out of style. Transforming the hearsay history of a gangster's life into something shrewder than a mere morality tale, yet more disciplined than a romantic celebration of outlaw heroism, he keeps reminding us that back in Bugsy's day, the mark of a good screenplay was great wordplay.
Director Barry Levinson, who has been known to place a sentimental scrim over the past, avoids the temptation here. He envisions old-time Hollywood as sleek, hard and distracted by its own overnight success. The whole town acts like an overhandsome star -- rather like Bugsy's friend George Raft (whom Joe Mantegna plays a little too kindly in the film) -- a dumb guy who thinks his prosperity proves that he's smart.