(2 of 5)
The movie is lavishly lit and wonderful to look at, a sumptuous blend of realistic sets slightly scaled down to kid size (wet streets, neon signs, shabby rooming houses and dingy soup kitchens) and refracted whimsy. At Fat Sam's, the "house special" is soda pop, and the custom-built cars that haul the marauding hoods around are driven by pedal power. Lots of people get rubbed out in the gangland power struggle, but nobody dies. The splurge tommy guns, designed with the help of a gunsmith, shoot a substance that looks like deliquescent marshmallow. If anyone is hit by a fusillade of splurge—or, alternatively, with a custard pie in the kisser—their passing is denoted simply and rather sweetly by a frame freeze of their plastered visage. Ultimately, though, pies and even splurge become harmless in a raucous grand finale that finds the entire cast embroiled in an all-out battle of sweet shooting and pie heaving. No one perishes, and the gang war turns to open revelry when the combatants, richly creamed but unbowed, lay down their arms and join in a rinky-tink anthem to brotherhood.
The kids—many nonprofessionals —are mostly terrific. Some of the best moments in the movie come with their smallest gestures: Bugsy snapping the brim of his fedora; Tallulah cosying up to a customer, taking off his glasses and starting to tease him as the flustered fellow gropes desperately for his tortoise shells; Dandy Dan deflecting a compliment from his gang with an uncharacteristic— thus unconvincing— show of humility and a disingenuous demurrer. "Too kind, guys. Too kind."
Parker recreates old movie clichés with shameless abandon: a car chase is routed through a barn, from which the autos emerge covered with straw and squawking hens. Fat Sam's speakeasy has a janitor (played by a winning, wistful Albin Jenkins) who mops floors and dreams of being a tap dancer. Parker reproduces, in the character of Blousey. the goody-goody bitchiness that made the "nice girls" of gangster flicks such eminent candidates for strangulation. The hoofing is exuberant and surprisingly adept, even if Paul Williams' musical score is a little slick. The whole movie has an innocence that is not entirely without calculation, but on balance it is a festive occasion.
Bugsy—currently doing turn-a way business in London and scheduled to open Stateside in mid-September—fits into that peculiarly British tradition of grown-up childhood literature. Consider Never-Never Land transported to 1929 New York City and Peter Pan sporting a chalk-stripe double-breasted. The imagination stretches but does not break. There is a certain bizarre continuity there, although Alan Parker, 32, sees his creation more modestly, as a sort of ebullient novelty. "I knew that if I were ever going to break into dramatic film," he says, "I'd need an angle."