Billy Bathgate (1991)

Lack of good storyline.

Just what I expected

Unshakable, witty and deeply felt, the film will be paying emotional dividends for a long, long time.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

An excellent movie about gangsters without being bored. A cast of actors simply amazing, with the beautiful Nicole Kidman more beautiful than ever. Unlike Godfather, here we see the mafia world through the eyes of a street kid who wants fame and money.In the Godfather movie, all the characters are already on top, it does not show how they arrived and they are almost invincible to either the government, the police or rival gangs. Here the mob has to work hard. Violence is just right and the nudity scenes are very well done. A nudity scene always improves the movie in question. The action is also very good, here there is no place for annoyance. A movie that I like a lot, I have in Blu ray and I recommend it.

Well acted, with a nice dual story going on, add in Nicole Kidman naked and hey.. this isn't bad at all!! Add in Dustin damn Hoffman as our lead gangster, and stuff is getting interesting!! Our main character however, is BILLY- a streetwise kid with a heart of gold that wants to see if he has a shot at making it big with Dutch - the guy who owns the neighborhood. Things are in transition for Dutch, and Billy is exposed to the pressures and pitfalls of running a criminal organization by falling in with Dutch.Enter Nicole Kidman- Dutch is smitten with her beauty, she's married but she has a thing for gangsters apparently...This has a lot of tension in the triangle between Mrs. Harrison (Nicole), Dutch (Dustin) And Billy.A cameo from Bruce Willis is a welcome counterpoint to the interpretation of Dutch, and you will recognize one of Dutch's henchmen from Fargo or Reservoir Dogs. ;-) I would have liked the ending to be a bit more elaborate but the ride there was pretty damn elaborate so it's all good.

The photography is impressive. It turns every surface damp and cold, every texture abrasive. The woods of Onandaga may be dark and deep but they ain't lovely. The forest floor is layered with long-fallen, discarded tannic leaf remnants. The rocks around the waterfall are sharp, the color of onyx. And if I were Nicole Kidman I wouldn't strip and leap naked into that black pool, although I'm happy that she was willing to. The cityscapes are worse. The vast expanse of the brick walls is ugly. The apartment interiors are furnished with stuffed chairs that look stiff and uninviting. And the set designer gives us walls that -- well, as Oscar Wilde said on his deathbed, "Either this wallpaper goes or I do." The Palace chop house in Newark, where Dutch and his gang are finally eliminated, has a brave little neon sign over its window but it still looks like the most dismal saloon in the world. Maybe it's just in the nature of Newark to seem melancholic.Actually the movie is technically pretty well done. We can more or less follow the antics of Dutch Schultz (Hoffman) as he executes a betrayer (Willis) and adopts his girlfriend (Kidman), as well as a young man he takes a heterosexual fancy to (Dean). There are intermittent flashbacks to Willis's murder. They're terrifying. Willis is taken out into New York harbor on a boat, tied to a chair, his feet encased in a tub of drying cement. And all this time we thought that the feet-in-the-cement business was nothing more than a joke.The performances are uniformly good. Hoffman is fine as a gangster who has broken his tether and gone wild, despite the warnings of his closest adviser, Steven Hill. Schultz puts his philosophy something like this -- "If I say I'll do somethin', I do it. If I say I won't do somethin', I don't do it. And if anybody gets in my way he knows I'll kill him." Loren Dean is the open-mouthed teenager from the slums who wants desperately to join the gang and winds up with a lot of money and his body parts barely intact. He's kind of clean-cut looking and does a good turn, without any chance for a bravura scene. Nicole Kidman is a kind of perambulating cat house, a tough cookie with meltingly good looks. "You're Dutch's girl," Dean tells her. "I'm not his girl," she replies. "He's my gangster." That nose of hers. There must be an Intelligent Designer after all, and he's a geometrician who has had a hand in designing that nose. I'm trying to imagine Kidman playing, say, a nun -- but I can't do it. Stanley Tucci is excellent as Lucky Luciano, whom nobody but Arthur Fliegenheimer would want for a compadre.There's a shocking scene in which Dutch interrupts himself in the middle of a sentence -- with a bullet. A dead man bleeds all over the hotel carpet and it won't come out. So while they're matter-of-factly lugging the body around in a laundry cart they break Dean's nose to provide fresh blood and to provide evidence of an accident for the hotel staff.It's an intense movie with practically no jokes. I don't know that it adds much to cinematic history but it's a professional piece of work and keeps your interest.

***SPOILERS*** Truth and fiction are mixed into the movie "Billy Bathgate" and the results comes out like an upside-down cake; totally confusing. At the beginning of the film see Bo Weinberg, Bruce Willis, on his way to go the sleep with the fishes, deep sixth-ed, for something that he did to hurt his boss Dutch, Arthur Fegenheimer, Schultz (Dustin Hoffman). We never really find out what Bo did to deserve the fate awaiting him if he did anything at all since we have to take Bo's word that he's somehow been framed and is totally innocent of the charges that Dutch accuses him of.Shipped out to sea with a pair of cement shoes Bo gives us this cock and bull story about how he was the reason for Dutch's amazing success as a big time hoodlum and now with him about, or be made, to check out for good Dutch's days will be numbered as both the Feds the State Special Prosecutor, Tom Dewy, as well as his fellow hoods will put an end to him. It's here that we get to see Billy Bathgate, Loren Dean, who together with Schultz's top hit-man Irving, Steve Buscemi, are to do in Bo by dropping him, cement shoes and all, overboard.The movie goes into a series flashback showing how Billy got to know and become a member of Schultz's gang. The flashbacks are so badly mishandled that for a time you don't really know if you either in the past or the present. We don't even realize that Bo was done in, by drowning, until more then half way into the movie and even worse we don't get any solid information at all to why he was done in by Schultz in the first place! The only thing that Schultz was reported to be trying to do was make a deal with a rival hoodlum but were not told what it had to do with Bo! It's later found out by Billy from the late Bo's girlfriend Drew, Nicole Kidman, that one night at a party with Bo, as she was almost out cold from drinking, she saw him with this guy Lucky Luciano, Stanley Tucci. Luciano's a mobster that Schultz's is allied with but all this came out after Bo was put on ice and even if, the Schultz-Luciano meeting, came out when he was still alive and breathing what did it exactly mean to Schultz anyway? Schultz was Luciano's partner in crime and even more important why would anyone believe someone like Drew who was admittedly dead dunk at the time of her supposedly seeing both Bo and Lucky together?Schultz is shown in the movie as he really was in real life a trigger-happy and murderous psychotic and Hoffman's portrayal of him is right on target. The rest of the cast is just wasted in this movie by the silly lines and roles that their given. Drew is slated to be hit by Schultz because she knew that he had her boyfriend,Bo, murdered even though she was nowhere near the murder scene. Billy who was not only at the scene of Bo's murder but also participated in it is somehow left alive by the grateful Dutchman?The hit on Drew was decided to take place at the Saratoga racetrack with Irving given the honors to do the job. Billy who was having an affair with Drew and knew about her forthcoming demise does everything possible to prevent her execution and calls her closet gay husband Harvey, Xander Berkeley, back in New York City to come over and rescue her.It turns out that Harvey is a big shot in both city and state government and murdering his wife would bring the entire wrath of the state district attorney's office right on top of Schultz's head. All that keeps, together with Billy running interference for her at the track, Drew from being hit as she and Harvey leave the racetrack and fly back to NYC. With Schultz supposedly knowing all this about her and her husband Harvey Why then was Drew to be hit in the first place? Was it that Irving and the rest of the Schultz Gang were somehow ignorant of this very important and public fact, Drew's husband having power and influence, when Dutch put the hit on her?"Billy Bathgate" also has to do with Schultz's legal problems with both the Feds and the State's Special Prosecutor Tom Dewey. Schultz, with the help of his lawyers, gets a change of venue for his trial on income tax evasion out of New York City to some obscure upstate town where he puts on an act as a nice guy. A person that you wound't mind inviting over to your house to have a couple of beers with.Despite losing it and blowing away one of his associates Julie Martin, Mike Starr, for skimming off his hard earned cash Schultz's get's off the hook by a friendly jury verdict of not-guilty. Still it's that annoying prosecutor Tom Dewey who refuses to be paid off by Schultz to drop his case since Dewy is planning to run for governor of New York and later president. And in him putting the Dutchman behind bars may well be the feather in Dewy's cap that would get him elected: Dewy in fact wasn't losing both to FDR and later Harry Truman in the 1944 and 1948 presidential elections.Determined to stop the now crazy Dutchman from killing Dewy Luciano ordered him and his gang members to be hit in a Newark stake-house. The irony of Luciano preventing Dewey from being murdered by Schultz's mobsters was that the next year Luciano himself was busted by Dewy for running a prostitution ring. That eventually lead to Luciano being deported back to his home in Italy as an undesirable alien. History has a strange way of straightening things out doesn't it.