HOOK
With Dustin Hoffman, Robin Williams, Julia Roberts, Bob Hoskins, Maggie Smith, Caroline Goodall, and Charlie Korsmo.
With Warren Beatty, Annette Bening, Harvey Keitel, Ben Kingsley, Elliott Gould, Joe Mantegna, and Bebe Neuwirth.
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Bugsy, by contrast, is clearly meant to convey an overall sense of loss, even though much of the movie registers as comedy. The only attempt at any final uplift–which is significantly missing from Toback’s published version of the script–is a title that informs us that Bugsy Siegel’s doomed investment in Las Vegas went on to yield billions of dollars after his death, and it’s a credit to the film as a whole that this title, while undoubtedly accurate and perhaps even heartfelt, has a decisively hollow ring. Bugsy is not exactly Citizen Kane, but to be told at the end that Siegel’s beatific vision of vulgarity ultimately triumphed financially is tantamount to concluding Kane, black smoke billowing from Kane’s mansion, with Bernstein’s little apologia: “You take the Spanish-American War. I guess Mr. Leland was right. That was Mr. Kane’s war. We didn’t really have anything to fight about. But do you think if it hadn’t been for that war of Mr. Kane’s we’d have the Panama Canal?”
I still haven’t gotten around to reading J.M. Barrie’s 1911 novel, but I’ve enjoyed Herbert Brenon’s delightful 1924 film version, the crocodile in Disney’s 1953 cartoon feature, and Jean Arthur flying around on invisible wires in the 1950 version on Broadway (less well-known than the production with Mary Martin), which I happened to see at the age of seven. My most vivid memory of the stage version is the moment when the audience members are told that they can only save Tinkerbell from an otherwise certain death by declaring in loud voices that they believe in fairies.
Continuity in this dreamy saga is partially provided by a few well-chosen Gatsby-like motifs and devices: the nonsensical line Siegel repeats (“Twenty dwarfs took turns doing handstands on the carpet”) to improve his elocution, the frequent home projection of his awkward screen test, a grimly elegiac Ennio Morricone score that functions a bit like the lovesick glitter of Fitzgerald’s prose.
