By the numbers

Hoodlum adds color to a familiar tale

by Peter Keough

Directed by Bill Duke. Written by Chris Brancato. With Laurence Fishburne, Tim Roth, Vanessa Williams, Andy Garcia, Cicely Tyson, Chi McBride, Richard Bradford, William Atherton, Loretta Devine, and Queen Latifah. A United Artists Pictures release. At the Harbour Mall, Holiday, Showcase, Tri-Boro, and Woonsocket cinemas.

The gangster movie is so endemic to American pop culture, it's practically an instinct, a dark allegory of the American Dream. There's little to be gained by changing its inevitable pattern, only by broadening its scope and refining and deepening its shadows. That's what Francis Coppola did in his first two parts of The Godfather, and it's what Bill Duke attempts and largely succeeds at in his epic-feeling if generically titled Hoodlum. The familiar rhythms of the outlaw's rise and fall are conveyed with artful atmosphere, earthy humor, jolting energy, and, most important, exuberant performances, not just from the central cast but from the vivid and inspired supporting players.

Chief among Duke's variations on the underworld theme is race. Set in Harlem in the 1930s (lushly re-created in Chicago), Hoodlum is the familiar Dutch Schultz/Lucky Luciano story, told this time from the point of view of Ellsworth "Bumpy" Johnson (an alternately cool and sizzling Laurence Fishburne), lord of the coveted Uptown numbers racket. Originally an enlightened matriarchy ruled by "Queen of Policy" Stephanie St. Clair (a feline Cicely Tyson, looking sultry and regal in her period, voodoo-tinged attire), the operation is invaded by Dutch Schultz (Tim Roth, whose slovenly, foul-mouthed nihilism adds a new wrinkle to his patented sociopaths), an on-again, off-again partner in crime with Lucky Luciano (a dapper and decadent Andy Garcia), Don of the Downtown mob.

St. Clair counsels appeasement and diplomacy, but Bumpy, recently sprung from Sing Sing on a murder rap, insists that Schultz must be confronted. After St. Clair is nearly killed on the way to a performance of Verdi's Macbeth, and several of her bodyguards are dispatched in a spectacularly shot and orchestrated ambush, Bumpy's methods prevail. A gang war erupts in an exhilarating montage of shootouts and vintage '30s movie devices -- calendar pages and newspaper headlines. In these action sequences Duke's style spans the history of the genre, from the tabloid grit of Howard Hawks's Scarface to the operatic ironies of The Godfather. In one Coppola-esque moment, a bloodstained St. Clair and Bumpy listen in grief and rage to a recording of an aria from the Macbeth they never attended. That's just one example of the director's skill in interweaving themes, mood, and narrative threads.

But he also aspires to moral and political relevance -- which is a stretch. Overshadowing Bumpy's differences in mob philosophy with St. Clair are some portentous dialogues with Francine (a pretty and brittle Vanessa Williams), his alleged love interest. Bumpy defends his racketeering operation, which employs some 3000 people, as Harlem's only viable asset and industry. Francine, who works for a neighborhood mission, denounces him for draining the community and deplores the violence that is turning him into a mirror image of Schultz. Bumpy defuses the debate temporarily by nabbing Schultz's weekly take and tossing it at those lined up at Francine's soup kitchen, after which Francine becomes his mistress. The issue, like their sporadically heated relationship, seems obligatory and perfunctory.

Besides, it's a wet towel tossed on the great fun of watching the Machiavellian schemes of Bumpy, Lucky, and Dutch uncoil, collide, and consume one another. The deception, betrayal, and intrigue are Bardic in their ambition and executed with jovial excess. Hoodlum delights in earthy, irreverent, macabre humor; in one set piece the Humpty Dumpty-ish Salke brothers (Mike and Beau Starr), ice-ax-wielding hitmen, compare notes on where to get the best hot dogs or cheesecake in town even as they're wiping out bodyguards in a stab at whacking Bumpy.

Combine these fully-fleshed details with full-blooded (though not for long) secondary characters like Bumpy's roly-poly best pal Illinois (Chi McBride), his "big" girlfriend Pigfoot Mary (Loretta Devine), the tic-addled henchman Whispers (Paul Benjamin) and a seething Clarence Williams III as one of Schultz's discontented enforcers and you get the woof and warp of Hoodlum's vast tapestry. Like the nickels and dimes of Harlem's poor, they add up to a big killing, one that Hollywood, until now, has impoverished itself by ignoring.

Peter Keough can be reached at pkeough[a]phx.com.