September 11–18, 1997

movie shorts

Hoodlum

In Hoodlum, there are no unexpected bombshells, only by-the-numbers here-we-go-agains. The movie, full of showy moves, alludes to the old studio gangster pictures that Warner Brothers used to generate on a monthly, even weekly basis, with contract players like Cagney, George Raft and Bogart. The difference is that Hoodlum is premised on at least one major change in the standard cinematic versions of New York's gangster past, in that it focuses on a black man, Ellsworth "Bumpy" Johnson (played here by Laurence Fishburne, who also starred in Deep Cover). I was hoping that the film would provide some new angles on the ways that gangsters operated, within, for instance, racist and sexist social orders. But Hoodlum doesn't do that. What it does do is replay some generic conventions. There is something vaguely satisfying about seeing him and his black cronies taking over the white mobster territories, but that's the extent of the politicized background. Mostly, the film functions as a conventional circa-1940s morality play, with Bumpy learning the hard way that crime doesn't pay so well as it seems to at first.

— Cindy Fuchs

(AMC Anthony Wayne; AMC Orleans; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Riverview; UA Sameric; UA 69th St.; UA Ardmore)