American Gangster
Directed by Ridley Scott
Frank Lucas, the title character of American Gangster, is a precise and controlled man. A Harlem kingpin in the late 1960s and early '70s, Lucas (Denzel Washington) dresses formally in quiet suits and ties, adheres to a rigorous schedule, provides stable employment for his family, is a hero in his neighborhood for providing community services, and lives with his mother. Lucas has become the most successful heroin dealer in New York, and is entirely invisible to the authorities. They are wedded to the idea that organized crime is the exclusive province of Italians, and that any black crook must be in the Mafia's employ.
Lucas prizes his low profile. He upbraids one of his brothers for tricking himself out like a pimp at a Harlem nightclub because a successful and powerful man does not need to stand out. One night, and only one night, Lucas fails to heed his own advice. He has just proposed to his girlfriend, Miss Puerto Rico, and she has presented him with a $50,000 chinchilla coat and hat to wear to the championship boxing match between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier.
Because of his showy gear and ringside seats, Lucas captures the attention of two police officers working in the area of drug enforcement. One is Richie Roberts (Russell Crowe), a Newark cop whose private life is as sloppy as Lucas's is disciplined but who won't take an illicit cent. The other is Trupo (Josh Brolin), a demonically dirty New York City
cop who follows Lucas's limousine after his wedding, pulls it over and demands $10,000 a week in payoffs. Lucas arrives at his home, goes to his closet, and in front of his stricken wife, throws the chinchilla coat into the fire. His moment of flashy behavior has numbered his own days, and he knows it. But it won't be Trupo who brings Lucas down.
Beautifully detailed and masterfully acted, American Gangster is a thrilling throwback to the grungy, grimy, morally ambiguous New York crime movies of the 1970s, when revelations of police corruption seemed to offer some explanation for the city's rapid decline into a state of nature: The good guys are working for the bad guys. The visually meticulous Ridley Scott--whose credits include Alien, Blade Runner, and Gladiator--has long seemed the polar opposite of fast-working street-level directors like Sidney Lumet, whose Serpico and Prince of the City are the clear antecedents for American Gangster's portrait of cops gone bad and the good cops who suffer because of the corruption of their colleagues.
Scott, whose last two films were the execrable Kingdom of Heaven and the unwatchable A Good Year, has found new life at the age of 70 by looking to the looser and more down-to-earth work of Lumet and others. The movie that seems to have had the most influence on Scott and screenwriter Steven Zaillian is an uncompromisingly tough and ugly B-picture from 1972 called Across 110th Street, whose classic theme song by Bobby Womack makes a welcome appearance on American Gangster's soundtrack. In Across 110th Street, vicious cops led by Anthony Quinn, and soft Mafia scions led by Tony Franciosa, find themselves being challenged and superseded by a surging black underworld they cannot penetrate or control.
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