Compared to other Dutch Shultz movies

Billy Bathgate and Hoodlum each get aspects of Schultz right but a combination of the two would serve as much more accurate. Billy Bathgate, to a degree, taps into the kind of paternal nature that Schultz seemed to exhibit sometimes; an A&E documentary a few years back had an interview with a man who briefly befriended Schultz when he was a teenager, and Schultz used to visit his father's ranch to ride horses (this was during the period Schultz was buttering up Syracuse, as seen in Billy Batgate, where the town name is changed to Onondaga). The man recalled that one day, he and Schultz were out riding horses when a photographer jumped out of some bushes and took photos of them. Schultz got down off of his horse, grabbed the photographer's camera, and destroyed the film, saying that while he was well aware of his own reputation, he wasn't going to have the boy's reputation sullied through association. Also, much more famously, the last straw that broke the camel's back in Schultz's street war with Vincent Coll was when Coll shot to death a five year old boy who got in the way. For this, Schultz had Coll literally chopped in half with machine gun fire.

A large part of this nature, which is never addressed in either the book or movie of Billy Bathgate, is that Schultz himself, until the age of fifteen, was a doting daddy's boy and all around pretty good apple. It was only when the elder Flegenheimer left the family, essentially telling them that he didn't particularly love any of them, that Schultz seemed to "snap" and go down the road to gangsterdom.

On the other hand, Schultz was also notoriously crude around his associates, not always very charismatic, and had some serious sadistic tendencies. One of his rivals suffered the gruesome fate of being strung up by his thumbs with puss from Schultz's gonhorrea infection smeared in his eyes (that poor sap went blind), and Julie Martin, the giant thug who Schultz shoots in the hotel in Billy Bathgate, was found with his heart carved out, an act which Schultz later admitted committing to his lawyer.

Physically, neither is terribly close. A person I know met Dustin Hoffman once and reported him to be especially short for a man--roughly five foot one--whereas Schultz, although a slight man, was about 5'6-5'7. He was also stocky, though, whereas Roth played him fairly skinny; though not gargantuan, Schultz was a fairly bulky individual, weighing around 190, according to his wanted poster. If you want to see Schultz "in action," that A&E documentary I mentioned has what might be the only videoclip of him, which, although only about eight seconds long, speaks volumes about the man; he looks almost like a gorilla in his build, and when he turns his head in the direction of the camera, his eyes remain fixed in another direction for a split second before they appear to "roll" sideways in his skull to align with the direction the rest of his body is facing. Unfortunately, no mention has ever been given in true crime literature to his voice, aside from the fact that he had a pronounced accent that caused him to pronounce "germs" as "goims" and "had to" as "hadda."

Hoodlum and BB, as the above poster said, each get certain aspects of his death right. BB portrays Schultz running out, guns blazing, and getting shot to death. In reality, evidence points to him getting shot while taking a whiz in the urinal. Hoodlum portays Schultz's henchman, Lulu Rosenkrantz, turning on him and killing him, a myth propagated by an old "Untouchables" episode. In fact, Rosenkrantz died alongside Schultz, and even took more damage: Whereas Schultz was only shot once, Rosenkrantz took repeated shotgun blasts at close range, an entire cylinder of .38 bullets, and still managed to drag himself to the pay phone to call 911 before passing out (a marvel of 1930s medicine, he lived for some 25 hours). Hoodlum does accurately portray, to a degree, Schultz's response to being shot: He went down, then pulled himself up, buttoned his fly, and staggered out into the bar, where he sat down and then promptly fell face-first onto his table (a photo of a mortally wounded Schultz, head turned sideways, arm outstretched, has become infamous in gangland photography)

Abe Landau, called Irving in both the book and movie of Billy Bathgate (anyone know why? I was told that apparently Landau has surviving relatives and that this was done for legal reasons) also died alongside Schultz; he was the first to expire, and it's still not decided upon whether he died at the scene or en route. A popular version of the story has him bleeding to death in front of the bar, which is plausible; one of the rounds that hit him, a .38 special, entered his shoulder and exited his neck, severing the carotid artery, and another round struck him in the wrist, opening up the veins there. Arriving officers found Landau sitting on top of a trash can outside the bar, where he fell after chasing the gunmen out of the building.

Otto Berman, portrayed radically different than in real life (in the real world, he was roughly five-foot-four, weighed nearly 300lbs, and was a notorious boozer and womanizer) also died alongside Schultz, taking a shotgun blast and some bullet wounds. In the end of the book of Billy Bathgate, E.L. Doctorow (perhaps intentionally) switches the positions in which Berman and Schultz were found; Berman is the one slumped on the table, whereas in real life he was shot before he could stand up from his table, and was found by the authorities sprawled out on the floor. Overall, despite the historical inaccuracy, I must say that Doctorow's treatment of Berman is one of my favorite literary characters.