Billy Bathgate ** (1991, Dustin Hoffman, Nicole Kidman, Loren Dean, Bruce Willis, Steven Hill, Steve Buscemi) – Classic Movie Review 10,158

If taste and talent were all, director Robert Benton’s 1991 film of novelist E L Doctorow’s fantasised biopic of young Billy (Loren Dean), who is taken up by the real-life Thirties New York City gangster Dutch Schultz (Dustin Hoffman), would be a classic.

But Billy Bathgate is an arid exercise in high style, with hardly a breath of life, fear of death or even much suspense, and director Benton must be held responsible for the slack, overblown handling, just as Tom Stoppard must be held responsible for the slack, overblown screenplay.

However, Hoffman holds the centre, in a startling, though too mannered portrayal of evil, Bruce Willis catches the eye in an extended cameo as the crooked fixer playboy Bo Weinberg, Nicole Kidman is pleasant as Hoffman’s moll for whom Billy forms a dangerous passion, and character player Steven Hill is superb as Hoffman’s right-hand man Otto Berman. And Steve Buscemi, John Costelloe, Billy Jaye, Stanley Tucci, Frances Conroy, Moira Kelly Timothy Jerome, Stephen Joyce, Robert F Colesberry and Mike Starr are in the great supporting cast too.

Along with the actors, the impeccable period production designed by Patrizia Von Brandenstein and Nestor Almendros’s glorious cinematography help to make this $48 million budgeted box-office flop watchable. It grossed only $15,565,363 in the US.

The 54-year-old Hoffman plays a middle-aged Schultz, but the gangster was only 34 at the time of his death.

© Derek Winnert 2020 Classic Movie Review 10,158

Check out more reviews on http://derekwinnert.com