I thought Hoffman, Willis, and Dean were all great......Dean should be much more well known.....
"All actors are essentially liars"....Johnny Depp
It was a very good film.Not only the acting and writing,but Nicole Kidman's skinny-dipping scene-boy howdy!
A bit of trivia:In real life,Schultz was merciful enough to put a bullet in Bo Weinberg's head before he took his infamous one-way swim.
I beg... implore... beseech anyone who thought that this was a good movie, to go read the book. You will be blown away. The movie possesses a mild FRACTION of the impact of the book.
shareI saw the film years ago, liked it very much, and recently read a review at Amazon where the name of Willis' character was stated as Bo Widerberg. Was it really like that? (the last name isn't mentioned often in the movie).
Nice homage, I thought laughing, since Bo Widerberg was one of the best-known Swedish film directors in the generation after Ingmar Bergman. One of his greatets successes was the first modern Swedish police thriller to really make it and seem naturally gritty, "Mannen på taket" (The Man on the Roof, 1977).
The name of Willis' character is Bo Weinberg; Dutch Schultz' key enforcer at one point. It is rumored he was the one who shot Mad Dog Coll in the phone booth on Dutch's orders. It is true he was mercifully killed with a bullet to the head by another Schultz lieutenant under suspicion that Weinberg turned on Dutch to go to another crime family. The scene at the beginning in flash back where he is given cement shoes was to give some drama; but it was not how Weinberg really died.
shareWhile it's true that Schultz associates said (for the most part) that Weinberg was shot in the mouth/head/face in his home, the method of "disposing" of his corpse in this movie is still accurate.
Dutch Schultz to Bo Weinberg's brother:
"I'm real sorry but we hadda give Bo a kimono."
Giving someone a "kimono" was a method of corpse disposal Schultz came up with (or, more likely, stole from someone else who was too dead to cry thievery) that, as opposed to sticking someone's feet in cement, involved putting a large portion of the body inside of a cabinet or other large wooden structure, then filling it with cement, thus encasing most of the corpse in a giant block of concrete. It's no wonder that Bo Weinberg has never come up from the East River.
BartlebyScrivner:
I agree with what you said above about reading the book.
I read it before the movie was ever made and totally enjoyed it.
One evening with nothing better to do I'm surfing channels and land on this movie and think to myself, "Gee, this looks familiar" so I keep watching. Within a few minutes the lightbulb went off and I realized it was Billy Bathgate and kept watching.
It was good. But as is always the case, the movie can never quite do the book justice.
It was less unbearably tedious than the book.
share[deleted]
I Liked It,And Really Find It Underrated.
share