Billy Bathgate

Synopsis: In 1935, Bronx teenager Billy Behan (Loren Dean) attracts the attention of powerful mobster Dutch Schultz (Dustin Hoffman) and quickly becomes a part of his organization. WhenDutch’s right-hand man, Bo Weinberg (Bruce Willis)  is sprung selling Dutch out and taken for a one way sea trip, Billy promise to look after Bo’s girlfriend, Drew Preston (Nicole Kidman) who, as the saying goes, knows too much.

Based on a book by E.L Doctorow, adapted for the screen by Tom Stoppard and directed by Robert Benton who had taken Hoffman to a Best Actor Oscar with Kramer vs Kramer in 1979, one would be justified in expecting a more literary approach to the gangster movie. We do get that with Billy Bathgate and given the familiarity of the genre, a novel approach is in principle a good thing.  The problem here is that Benton doesn’t get it to work. 

The film together with Dick Tracy from the previous year marks a watershed in Hoffman’s career, ending a remarkable twenty year run between The Graduate (1967) and Rain Man, 1988 (the film that gave him his second Oscar) in which the actor made memorable film after film. Billy Bathgate effectively marked his departure from Hollywood's top rank.

Jimmy Cagney was a runt but in his gangster roles he projected great physical malevolence.  Edward G. Robinson too was a short-stop but he remains one of the great screen gangsters of all time. Hoffman who appears to be at least one to two feet shorter that everyone around him and is supposed to be a ruthless near-psychotic crime boss but Hoffman is never remotely intimidating let alone possessed of the requisite  gangster glamour (and in his final scene he comes across as more than a little incompetent with a gun). The casting incongruity is near as egregious as it was with  Arthur Penn’s Little Big Man (1970).  Hoffman's career survived that film but twenty years later forgiveness is not so easily come by.no doubt considerably because he was 54 at the time.

Hoffman’s mis-casting is compounded by that of Loren Dean, a young actor in virtually his first feature film of whom little has heard since. Dean is a bland presence who unlike Henry Hill in Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990) never seems emotionally-invested in the hoodlum lifestyle and even accepting him as a callow fellow traveller his fling with Kidman’s party girl is engineered by the script not by any real dynamic between the two actors (Kidman, who was then a relative unknown, on the other hand, is quite effective as a society broad with a taste for mobsters)

With $50 million spent on the production (although a significant amount of this was in blow-outs) the film looks good but you've got to ask why, if you were willing to spend so much money you wouldn’t have spent more time thinking about the casting.  Unsurprisingly the film flopped, returning just $15 million on its theatrical release.

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