It is strange to say that this was one of my favorite movies when I was younger. Strange, because this is not at all a kids movie. It is dark and violent and sexual and understated and talky and complicated. I recorded it off TV one night because I was seeking to see as many Academy Award nominated movies as I could at that time. I was probably 11 or 12. I had bought the soundtrack already and had soaked in Ennio Morricone's musical interludes. I loved Beatty in Dick Tracy and considered this, even then, to be his counterpoint to the do-good cop from the comics.
I probably didn't understand it much more than loving the spectacle of a stylish gangster who moves to Hollywood and speaks well enough and persuasively enough to always get what he wants. That and I liked that someone could be a visionary within a strange realm and be belittled and forgotten, even by history. That inspired me, somehow.
Now I watch the film and I can't help but feel a little nostalgic. The movie is nostalgic enough, but couple that with my own experience of having watched the film probably 5 or more times as a young movie buff. I remember the look of the empty Flamingo Hotel, the suit Beatty wears when he is walking in the desert, the tongue-twister repeated over-and-over at the beginning. But the image I most want to remember from Bugsy is the one above, the one where the artifice of the sets meets with the artifice in the smirks, where the line between text (fact) overlaps subtext (truth) and is swallowed up in context (perception). Maybe that's what nostalgia is. Maybe that's why I still call Bugsy a favorite.
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