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Not that Bugsy is in any sense a sociological tract. It is, perhaps most entertainingly, a love story. Before he conceived his grand passion for Las Vegas, Siegel conceived an equally obsessional devotion to starlet-moll Virginia Hill (Annette Bening), perhaps because she is the first woman capable of asking him, before they make love for the first time, "Do you always talk this much before you do it?" His chilling response is, "I only talk this much before I kill someone." Her success with him (she even manages to embezzle a couple of million from his casino's building fund) is based entirely on her willingness to risk his wrath, which means risking death. Bening gives a remarkable performance, proposing the intriguing possibility that a kept woman can also be a liberated woman. In any case, she shares her fears and vulnerability only in a few private moments with the camera, never with the besotted Bugsy.
But good as she and everyone else in Bugsy is (mention must be made of Harvey Keitel, Elliott Gould and Ben Kingsley as assorted thugs and mugs), the picture belongs, in every sense of the word, to Beatty. It is impossible to say whether, as an actor, he is performing or behaving, though he obviously sees something of Bugsy in himself. As Toback says, "He combines an elegant and well-cultivated charm with a tensely impacted psychosis. The role gave him a historical person through whom he could express his wild extremes."
As a producer, Beatty is quite aware that Bugsy is for him what Las Vegas was for the character he plays: an obsession he is determined to impose on an indifferent, not to say hostile, world. He's been here before, with his first production, Bonnie and Clyde (which, because it is an utterly unmoralistic portrayal of interpenetrated charm, sexuality and monstrousness, Bugsy most resembles), and with such subsequent singularities as Shampoo, Reds and Dick Tracy. His track record is one of aspiration -- and is marked by commercial successes that startled the conventional wisdom.
As Bugsy may too. For the moment, Hollywood is dubious. It holds that the public doesn't want period pieces or gangster films (look at The Godfather Part III and Billy Bathgate) and may not want Warren Beatty, who at 54 is no longer the really cute guy he once was. But the film is a commentary on the conventions of the gangster genre, not a mindless repetition of them. And Beatty is not a star appearing but an actor acting -- mercurially, hypnotically. Like the film, he is metaphorically but ferociously at grips with American ambiguities: infamy as a form of fame, violence as an aspect of the visionary, bold greed as relief and corrective for our pious official hypocrisies.
Beatty knows Bugsy is a tough sell in this climate. He recognizes that its best hope is critical endorsement, yet glumly expects "moral disapproval" from some reviewers. "Critics will say that Bugsy, like Bonnie and Clyde, makes the reprehensible palatable." But, as he also says, "it's important to break through this need to approve or disapprove of character" -- especially so, one feels compelled to add, when the content of almost every American movie is dictated by demographics or congealed by political correctness. Our biggest need right now is to be appalled, shaken up -- by movies, by our public life in general. For a couple of riveting, dislocating hours, Bugsy does just that.