Word: gangsterisms
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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American Dreaming by the gangster Bugsy Siegel, who, besides inventing himself as a Hollywood celebrity, invented Las Vegas as the playground for our more primitive fantasies. Warren Beatty and Annette Bening are terrific in director Barry Levinson's smart-ironic, romantic-perverse, funny-poignant take on modern life in a fast, deadly lane...
American Dreaming by the gangster Bugsy Siegel, who, besides inventing himself as a Hollywood celebrity, invented Las Vegas as the playground for our more primitive fantasies. Warren Beatty and Annette Bening are terrific in director Barry Levinson's smart-ironic, romantic-perverse, funny-poignant take on modern life in a fast, deadly lane...
...before. The title characters are written so carelessly that in the opening scene one cannot be sure whether they are newly wed or suffering from seven- year itch. Their marital discord flares up out of nowhere and ends just as abruptly. The wife's flirtation with an oily gangster fits no visible aspect of her personality. It is also baffling that she seems to find her husband raffish and charming when he is portrayed as an obvious alcoholic. Nora's closest bond seems to be with an old school friend, now a movie star, who induces the couple to take...
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...
...turn to the flipping of Philadelphia underboss Philip (Crazy Phil) Leonetti, who was scheduled to testify in the January trial against Gotti and Gravano. According to a five- page debriefing obtained by TIME, Leonetti told federal agents in late 1989 about the 1981 Valentine's Day murder of gangster Frank Stillitano, whose body had been found in the trunk of a rental car. Leonetti said members of the Philadelphia crime family had met with Gravano and other Gambino mobsters at Bally's Park Place Casino in Atlantic City, where they reached an agreement that the Philadelphia group would kill Stillitano...