Original Gangsta

NOBODY can whack the Mafia movie, but Tony Soprano did his best. After six riveting, exhaustive seasons with New Jersey’s leading crime family, a memo seems to have gone out to every filmmaker contemplating a gangster flick: No more Italians for a while, capisce? So Martin Scorsese, the paisan’s paisan, shipped up to Boston last year and went with Irish mobsters for The Departed, while this fall’s gangland forays, Eastern Promises and We Own the Night, have turned to the Russian mafia for inspiration. And now comes the baldly titled American Gangster, which aims to be to mob movies what its 1970s anti-hero, Frank Lucas, was to real-life mobsters: the one that finally earned African-American crime kingpins the respect they deserve.

That Lucas is played by Denzel Washington makes for a pretty good start; that he’s directed by Ridley Scott and backed up by Russell Crowe, as the rumpled, incorruptible cop on his trail, is likewise welcome tidings; that Frank Lucas’s real-life story is way stranger than fiction is the best news of all. Lucas showed up in New York City as a teenager and petty crook from backwoods North Carolina, and lucked his way into a job under the wing of Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson, the legendary boss of Harlem. (“Agentleman among gentlemen, a king among kings, a killer among killers, a whole book and Bible by himself,” Lucas said of Johnson a few years ago, in the riveting New York magazine profile that inspired Steven Zaillian’s screenplay.) When Johnson dropped dead two decades later, in 1968, Lucas was his driver, bagman, and bill collector, and that’s where the movie kicks off its story-with Bumpy expiring in Lucas’s arms, thrusting Harlem’s gangland into chaos and opening up a world of opportunities for a young man in a hurry.

About the Author

Ross Douthat

Ross Douthat is a former National Review contributing editor.

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NOBODY can whack the Mafia movie, but Tony Soprano did his best. After six riveting, exhaustive seasons with New Jersey’s leading crime family, a memo seems to have gone out to every filmmaker contemplating a gangster flick: No more Italians for a while, capisce? So Martin Scorsese, the paisan’s paisan, shipped up to Boston last year and went with Irish mobsters for The Departed, while this fall’s gangland forays, Eastern Promises and We Own the Night, have turned to the Russian mafia for inspiration. And now comes the baldly titled American Gangster, which aims to be to mob movies what its 1970s anti-hero, Frank Lucas, was to real-life mobsters: the one that finally earned African-American crime kingpins the respect they deserve.

That Lucas is played by Denzel Washington makes for a pretty good start; that he’s directed by Ridley Scott and backed up by Russell Crowe, as the rumpled, incorruptible cop on his trail, is likewise welcome tidings; that Frank Lucas’s real-life story is way stranger than fiction is the best news of all. Lucas showed up in New York City as a teenager and petty crook from backwoods North Carolina, and lucked his way into a job under the wing of Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson, the legendary boss of Harlem. (“Agentleman among gentlemen, a king among kings, a killer among killers, a whole book and Bible by himself,” Lucas said of Johnson a few years ago, in the riveting New York magazine profile that inspired Steven Zaillian’s screenplay.) When Johnson dropped dead two decades later, in 1968, Lucas was his driver, bagman, and bill collector, and that’s where the movie kicks off its story-with Bumpy expiring in Lucas’s arms, thrusting Harlem’s gangland into chaos and opening up a world of opportunities for a young man in a hurry.