Warning! This article contains spoilers!
Following my review of "American Gangster", I wanted to write a few more thoughts about the movie. The film boldly proclaims that it's 'based on a true story', but the idea of based is a confusing one.
'Based' means the frame of the story is more or less correct, but details and plot twists thrown in to make a good movie, or to change the nature of the characters.
I read the article by Marc Jacobson in New York Magazine, called 'The Return of Superfly', and I can see where the inspiration for the film came from. Frank Lucas is, by Jacobson's opinion, a wildly charismatic man who put black-run organized crime on the map.
The film features Denzel Washington as Lucas, and portrays him as a charming, elegant man with a fierce streak of integrity and honour. At one poignant scene in the film, Lucas interrupts his breakfast with his brothers to collect his cash from one of the local gangsters, and ends up killing him in the street.
It feels barbaric in the movie, out of place with Denzel's character, who goes from invisibility to headline star by popping a cap in the middle of the street. According to the article, Lucas really did that in the streets of Harlem, though you can imagine it was with less silver screen cinematics:
""He started cursing, saying he was going to make me his bitch and he'd do the same to my mama too. Well, as of now, he's dead. No question, a dead man. But I let him talk. A dead man got a right to say what he wants. Now the whole block is there, to see if I'm going to pussy out. He was still yelling. So I said to him, 'When you get through, let me know.' "
"Then the motherfucker broke for me. But he was too late. I shot him. Four times, right through here: bam, bam, bam, bam.
"Yeah, it was right there," says Frank Lucas, 35 years after the shooting, pointing out the car window. "The boy didn't have no head. The whole shit blowed out back there . . . That was my real initiation fee into taking over completely down here. Because I killed the baddest motherfucker. Not just in Harlem but in the world."
Then Frank laughs."
Jacobson goes on to describe Lucas' laugh, and it sounds terrifying. Interviewing him, Jacobson realizes that he's sitting down with a man that supplied much of the United States with heroin, and killed anyone out of line. Slaughtered them in the street, only to laugh about it 35 years later.
The 'laugh' is removed from the film, because it would lend a psychotic air to Lucas, who needs to be shown as an ethical man, within reason. We have to believe that Denzel is the good guy, and the other gangster deserved to die, within the rules of the street.
One of my dearly favourite scenes in the movie is the little heroin factory that Lucas set up in the projects... he's got a dozen beautiful, naked ebony women, cutting up dope. The colour of the skin in that room is enough to make you fall to the ground and pray for rain; it's a dangerous scene, because it's almost enough to make Australian film critics think about getting into that business.
Fortunately, for my imagination, that's all true:
"In front of a blue frame house on West 123rd Street, Lucas stops and gets nostalgic. "I had my best table workers in there," he says, describing how his "table workers," ten to twelve women naked except for surgical masks, would "whack up" the dope, cutting it with "60 percent mannite and 40 percent quinine." The petite, ruby-haired Red Top was in charge. "I'd bring in three, four keys, let Red go do her thing. She'd mix up that dope like a rabbit in a hat, never drop a speck"
Hallelujah.
Ridley Scott peppered the script with some striking lines, and, after reading Jacobson's article, I realized that he had pulled it straight from Lucas' mouth, though it's not always Lucas who says it.
Lucas says, in the movie and in the article:
""Don't cross me on this, because I am a busy man and have no time, no time whatsoever, to go to your funeral.""
In contrast, though, in one of the early scenes with Bumpy Johnson, the original Harlem gangster, Bumpy states, in a poetic monologue about the quickly changing Harlem neighborhood:
"Place is so big, you get lost past the bathroom sinks. But that's the way it is now. You can't find the heart of anything to stick the knife into.""
That's a wonderful quote, one that illustrates the cruel dread that followed Lucas. He said that, and you know he meant it.
Near the end of the film, Lucas' mother stops him in their home to warn him against getting in trouble with the police... her lines are lifted from Lucas' mouth, but by editing it and not delivering it from Lucas, we get a different sense of his character. She says something to the effect of:
"You know, if you'd been a preacher, [your brothers] would have been preachers. If you'd been a cop, they'd have been cops. I never asked you where all this money came from and I don't want to know... your brothers know and I know, you don't go around shooting cops"
Typical motherly sentiments, a warning against starting trouble with the authorities.
Lucas' original words, taken from the article:
"You know, if I'd been a preacher, they would have been preachers. If I'd been a cop, they'd have been cops. But I was a dope dealer, so they became dope dealers . . . I don't know . . . if I'd done right."
Jacobson should be commended for being there at the right time, right place. For us to feel any empathy for an anti-hero, we need to see regret, and this statement beautifully illustrates how the real Lucas feels regret. He may glamorize his memories of women, money and violence, but somewhere, he realizes the pain that he's brought to his family.
The movie spins off from here, showing Lucas getting arrested, then getting talked into giving up the corrupt police officers. This elevates Lucas from the figure of drug kingpin to heroic slayer of corruption - it seems that the dirty cops of the NYPD are the real villains of the movie, and Lucas and investigator Ritchie Roberts combine forces to bring them down.
It's a Hollywood spin, because it leads to that good ending. It didn't really go down that hard, and this article examines some of the 'facts' of the film. Jacobson's article is more poetic, I think, with Lucas out of prison and out of the game, looking with distaste at all the baggy panted gangsters that roam in true bling-style.
The real story seems more satisfying since Lucas' glamorous lifestyle was squandered and came to nothing, an empty gun roaming the streets of Harlem, reminiscing about corners where he shot people, clubs he used to own. Paradoxically, the film has brought so much attention to Lucas that he's flush with cash, and Denzel Washington bought him a Rolls.
But that's how we roll in Harlem.
Read the MSN interview with Frank Lucas 
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