Cuba – The Magnificent 60s

Murder Inc. gangster Meyer Lansky has featured in over a dozen Hollywood movies and television series from Lee Strasberg in The Godfather (1972) to Ben Kingsley in Bugsy (1991) and Dustin Hoffman in The Lost City (2015) so you could be asking why do we need another one? And it’s a good question because this part docu-drama, while recounting the well-known aspects of the mobster’s career, also examines less obvious areas as well as bringing the story up-to-date in a duel of wits between Lansky (Harvey Keitel) and the F.B.I. still chasing him for $300 million it presumes he has hidden away.

The movie is framed by journalist David Stone (Sam Worthington) interviewing Lansky about his life. This turns out to be far more interesting than previously portrayed. Sure, there’s plenty of executions, but Lansky was also the most financially acute of gangsters, taking the business legitimate in the fashion of Michael Corleone in The Godfather, realising that rather than killing businessmen who could not pay their debts it was more sensible to take over their businesses and improve them, and in order to keep everything above board when contracted to oversee all the casinos in Cuba refusing to rig machines in the house’s favour.

He’s also got a crippled son whose illness he perceives as a mathematical equation and is convinced he can beat the odds. In the course of his interviews, Stone falls for a honey trap and is blackmailed/bribed by the F.B.I. So tension is raised by the government agency hovering in the background, the mystery of the missing millions, and Stone’s fears that Lansky will find out he is being betrayed.

Biopics succeed or failed based on what aspects of the subjects life they choose to cover. All the big names are here – Al Capone (Robert Walker Branchaud), Lucky Luciano (Shane McRae), Salvatore Maranzano (Jay Giannone), Bugsy Siegel (David Cole) – but we also delve into territory almost foreign to the gangster genre with Lansky’s patriotism leading him to root out Nazi spies and sympathizers during world War Two, in return for which he secures the release from prison of Lucky Luciano. His return to Israel is scuppered by U.S.-Israel relations. And, no matter his courtesy and manners, he’s also a scumbag of the first order, committing wife Anne (AnnaSophia Robb) to a psychiatric hospital because she has the audacity to blame him for his crimes.

Adding some depth is the “currency” of traded favours, that the U.S. government had little compunction in utilising his services at a time when it was trying to crack down on organised crime. Even the ageing Lansky is clever enough to outwit his pursuers.

But, of course, movie length works against the film. It would have been better as a limited series, exploring the man’s entire career. Even so, it certainly provides new insight into the mind of a gangster who was a businessman, in the correct term of the word, first and foremost. In another world, he might have been acclaimed as the man who pioneered a gambling industry now worth $250 billion annually to the U.S. economy.

Harvey Keitel (The Irishman, 2019) shows no sign of calling time on a career over half a century old and his bemused take on the gangster is solid work. Sam Worthington (Fractured, 2019) is excellent as the compromised journalist trying to keep family and finances together. Look out for David Cade (Into the Ashes, 2019) as Lansky’s lifelong buddy, Minka Kelly (She’s in Portland, 2020) as the deceitful girlfriend and AnnaSophia Robb (Words on Bathroom Walls, 2020) as the showgirl who realises marriage is not all it’s cracked up to be.

This was something of a personal project for writer-director Eytan Rockaway (The Abandoned, 2015) since his father was the journalist in the film. Rockaway’s approach is an interesting twist on the gangster film and he elicits strong performances all round. The final scene you won’t see coming.

Authentic, atypical, engrossing, this grittier Hitchcock mixes the realism of Psycho (1960) and Marnie (1964) with the nihilism of The Birds (1963), a major departure for a canon that previously mostly spun on innocents or the falsely accused encountering peril. The hunt for a Russian spy ring by way of the Cuban missile crisis forms the story core but the director is more interested in personal consequence and even the villain suffers heart-rending loss. Betrayal is the other key theme – defection and infidelity go hand in hand.

The tradecraft of espionage is detailed – dead letter drops, film hidden in typewriting spools, an accidental collision that is actually a sweet handover. In a transcontinental tale that shifts from Copenhagen to New York to Cuba to Paris, there is still room for classic sequences of suspense – the theft of secret documents in a hotel the pick – and Hitchcock at times simply keeps the audience at bay by employing dumbshow at key moments.

In some respects the director was at the mercy of his material. In the documentary-style Leon Uris bestseller (almost a procedural spy novel), the main character is neither the trigger for the plot nor often its chief participant and is foreign to boot. So you could see the sense of employing a cast of relative unknowns, otherwise an audience would soon grow restless at long absences from the screen of a Hollywood star of the caliber of a Cary Grant or Paul Newman. It is a florist (Roscoe Lee Browne) who carries out the hotel theft, a small resistance cell the spying on Russian missiles in Cuba, a French journalist who beards one of the main suspects, not the ostensible main character, French agent Andre Devereux (Frederick Stafford), not his U.S. counterpart C.I.A. operative Michael Nordstrum (John Forsythe) nor Cuban villain Rico Parra (John Vernon).

Unusual, too, is the uber-realism. The main characters are fully aware of the dangers they face and of its impact on domestic life and accept such consequence as collateral damage. It is ironic that the Russian defector is far more interested in safeguarding his family than Devereux. Devereux’s wife (Dany Robin), Cuban lover Juanita (Karin Dor) and son-in-law (Michel Subor) all suffer as a result of his commitment to his country. And that Juanita (Karin Dor), leader of the Cuban resistance cell, is more of a patriot than the Russian, refusing to defect when offered the opportunity. Hitchcock even acknowledges genuine politics: the reason a Frenchman is involved is because following the Bay of Pigs debacle in 1961 American diplomats were not welcome in Cuba.

In terms of bravura Hitchcock, the pick of the scenes are the hotel theft and the death of one of the principals, filmed from above.

I have steered clear of this film for over half a century. I saw it on initial release long before the name Hitchcock meant anything to me. But once it did I soon realized this film did not easily fit into the classic Hitchcock and the critics on whom I relied had always represented it as shoddy goods. So I came to it with some trepidation and was surprised to find it so engrossing.

Frederick Stafford (O.S.S. 117: Mission for a Killer, 1965) was excellent with an insouciance reminiscent of Cary Grant and a raised eyebrow to match that star’s wryness. John Vernon, who I mostly knew as an over-the-top villain in pictures such as Fear Is the Key (1972), was surprisingly touching as the Cuban bad-guy who realizes his lover is a traitor. And there is a host of top French talent in Michel Piccoli (Belle de Jour, 1967), Philippe Noiret (Justine, 1969) Dany Robin (The Best House in London, 1969) and Karin Dor (You Only Live Twice, 1967).

As you are possibly aware, three endings were shot for this picture and I can’t tell you which I saw without spoiling the plot. If you want to know, read tomorrow’s Blog.

In any case, this is worth seeing more than just to complete a trawl through the entire Hitchcock oeuvre, a very mature and interesting work.

Tag: Cuba

Lansky (2021) ****

Topaz (1969) ****