Excellent but underrated film

Better Late Then Never

If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

Billy Bathgate is really good gangster movie,but something is missing, Dustin is usual as ever,great Loren Dean performance, Nicole Kidman as marvelous in breathtaking scenes and surprisingly the unforgettable our hero in the past in Mission Impossible series Steven Hill on a very respectable and fine acting, almost unnoticed if didn't l used to read the opening credits....more helping the Lucky guy along the picture like a father,based in real facts on the thirties.Resume: First watch: 1996 / How many: 2 / Source: TV-DVD / Rating: 7.25

An excellent movie about gangsters without being bored. A cast of actors simply amazing, with the beautiful Nicole Kidman more beautiful than ever. Unlike Godfather, here we see the mafia world through the eyes of a street kid who wants fame and money.In the Godfather movie, all the characters are already on top, it does not show how they arrived and they are almost invincible to either the government, the police or rival gangs. Here the mob has to work hard. Violence is just right and the nudity scenes are very well done. A nudity scene always improves the movie in question. The action is also very good, here there is no place for annoyance. A movie that I like a lot, I have in Blu ray and I recommend it.

Billy bathgate is a wonderful coming of age tale of a young man that has strode too far down into the rabbit whole of the socio-economic decay of 1930s New York. He is a greenhorn, wet behind the ears and it slow to pick up things from the more established Dustin Hoffman but never the less the movie is pretty amazing. Nicole Kidman is perhaps the best part of this movie as the vixen/femme fatale with a penchant for dangerous men and a lack of a sense of personal preservation fuels her own self-destructive behavior; yet she is still mesmerizing to watch. All and all the movie is cinematic gold and definitely a must-see for any fan of good films. Another great to keep an eye on is Nicole's next best "Trespass", I just saw the trailer and it looks pretty amazing.

The photography is impressive. It turns every surface damp and cold, every texture abrasive. The woods of Onandaga may be dark and deep but they ain't lovely. The forest floor is layered with long-fallen, discarded tannic leaf remnants. The rocks around the waterfall are sharp, the color of onyx. And if I were Nicole Kidman I wouldn't strip and leap naked into that black pool, although I'm happy that she was willing to. The cityscapes are worse. The vast expanse of the brick walls is ugly. The apartment interiors are furnished with stuffed chairs that look stiff and uninviting. And the set designer gives us walls that -- well, as Oscar Wilde said on his deathbed, "Either this wallpaper goes or I do." The Palace chop house in Newark, where Dutch and his gang are finally eliminated, has a brave little neon sign over its window but it still looks like the most dismal saloon in the world. Maybe it's just in the nature of Newark to seem melancholic.Actually the movie is technically pretty well done. We can more or less follow the antics of Dutch Schultz (Hoffman) as he executes a betrayer (Willis) and adopts his girlfriend (Kidman), as well as a young man he takes a heterosexual fancy to (Dean). There are intermittent flashbacks to Willis's murder. They're terrifying. Willis is taken out into New York harbor on a boat, tied to a chair, his feet encased in a tub of drying cement. And all this time we thought that the feet-in-the-cement business was nothing more than a joke.The performances are uniformly good. Hoffman is fine as a gangster who has broken his tether and gone wild, despite the warnings of his closest adviser, Steven Hill. Schultz puts his philosophy something like this -- "If I say I'll do somethin', I do it. If I say I won't do somethin', I don't do it. And if anybody gets in my way he knows I'll kill him." Loren Dean is the open-mouthed teenager from the slums who wants desperately to join the gang and winds up with a lot of money and his body parts barely intact. He's kind of clean-cut looking and does a good turn, without any chance for a bravura scene. Nicole Kidman is a kind of perambulating cat house, a tough cookie with meltingly good looks. "You're Dutch's girl," Dean tells her. "I'm not his girl," she replies. "He's my gangster." That nose of hers. There must be an Intelligent Designer after all, and he's a geometrician who has had a hand in designing that nose. I'm trying to imagine Kidman playing, say, a nun -- but I can't do it. Stanley Tucci is excellent as Lucky Luciano, whom nobody but Arthur Fliegenheimer would want for a compadre.There's a shocking scene in which Dutch interrupts himself in the middle of a sentence -- with a bullet. A dead man bleeds all over the hotel carpet and it won't come out. So while they're matter-of-factly lugging the body around in a laundry cart they break Dean's nose to provide fresh blood and to provide evidence of an accident for the hotel staff.It's an intense movie with practically no jokes. I don't know that it adds much to cinematic history but it's a professional piece of work and keeps your interest.