Virginia Hill

Joel Schumacher's first film is a made for television biopic about the girlfriend of someone famous where the story actually told isn't that of its main character while it feels like a bog-standard biopic of conventions. At least it looks decent sometimes and there are some pretty good performances. I mean, this is not a good film. It's poorly written and not terribly engaging, but the performances do enough to maintain interest as it moves quickly over its short 75-minute runtime.

There are two big structural problems with this film. The first is that it's a flashback within a flashback. I mean, the flashback that's most prominent, Virginia Hill (Dyan Cannon) during a Senate hearing on organized crime, works against the film because it's ultimately pointless and also undoes an effort at suspense late in the film, but the outer wrapping of the tale being purportedly told by Leo Ritchie (Allen Garfield), except it never even comes back by the end. It's supposed to create this sense of melancholy, Leo's part, but the Senate hearing is more purely informational. It doesn't add anything other than Virginia's insistence on calling Bugsy Siegel (Harvey Keitel) Ben after his death. It also eats up a solid amount of time to an already short film.

The second structural problem I have is that it feels like any other standard biopic where we get short, quick scenes to describe key events across an entire person's life. Combined with the low production values, these scenes just clip along, giving us basic, thin looks a moments of Virginia's life. Things start in Kentucky when her and her male friend Leroy (Robby Benson) escape her abusive father, make it to Chicago, meet Leo, through him meet the bigger gangster Nick Rubanos (John Vernon), and gets sent to California to have parties and keep an ear to the ground for the Chicago mob. It's here where she meets Siegel, they instantly fall in love, he takes her to the desert to build Las Vegas, it's a dismal failure at the start, and there's drama and Bugsy gets murdered because of it.

Now, whose story is the story of Las Vegas? Is it Virginia's story, or is it Bugsy's? Would Bugsy have built Vegas without Virginia? Well, according to this movie, that's a strong affirmative. He was already planning on it, had the money for it, and was just about to break ground when he met Virginia, and Virginia did nothing but look good in slinky dresses and get into a catfight with some coat check girls on the dismal opening day. In fact, in this story that's supposedly being dictated by Virginia, most of the key events happen when she's not in the room (also, there's so little ground talking about finances, instead focusing on her romantic entanglements that it's unclear why the Senate committee would want to hear any of this unless they're just gangster lover gossips).

Now, I'm going to script doctor a bit here. You have 75 minutes to tell the story of a famous gangster's girl, but the girl didn't do anything of note. Well, you can't focus on the gangster's achievements because they have nothing to do with the girl, what do you do instead? You also don't have a huge budget, can't use a lot of locations, and your cast is small. What do you do?

Well, you focus on no more than five scenes in her life, probably four at a max (think of the three scenes that make up Danny Boyle's Steve Jobs). And you jump into them to try and build a portrait of Virginia herself. You can include Leo as her introduction to the gangster world, Nick, and obviously Bugsy, but you don't include a single scene with Bugsy outside of her presence. One you do that, it's no longer about Virginia but about Bugsy and his business. Then, with that basic structure in mind, you ask, what is it about this woman that's interesting? And, the best I could come up with, using the finished film as a source of inspiration and nothing else, would be the rise from rags to riches and finding true love in a place that she shouldn't with danger that she's never exposed to but knows is around every corner. So, instead of a quick scene at the party where she meets Bugsy, you extend it out by about fifteen minutes where Bugsy turns his presence at the party into a seduction through dance and drink, pulling Virginia away from Leo (at least metaphorically) and into a higher plane of gangster life. You extend that into a couple of other things, highlighting this journey at specific points without trying to cover everything and keep a laser focus on Virginia herself.

It'd be a bit more experimental than a network would probably want, they'd probably insist on the Bugsy murder scene because it's a gangster movie about Bugsy Siegel that just happens to be named after his girl. However, I think my approach would be a better artistic approach.

So, the film is a staccato mess that doesn't focus on its title character, choosing instead to, understandably, focus on its more interesting male lead. Well, at least the film looks decent, considering its budgetary limits (there are some shadows along the edges of walls to give some depth!), and the performances are pretty good, the best going to Keitel and Vernon, the former who's just giving his professional best while the latter is just chewing scenery entertainingly. Cannon herself is fine, mostly looking good in form-fitting dresses but holding her own decently against Keitel and the rest.

I think it's main saving grace is its brevity. At only 75 minutes, it doesn't have time to drag, the quick pace of the film getting us from one thin event to the next without much fanfare. There's something to be said for that. As an introductory piece from Schumacher, he could have done a whole lot worse. His directorial work is journeyman and decent. His writing (cowriting with Juleen Compton) isn't good, but there are worse ways to begin a directorial career.