BEFORE: This is a bit weird because I only JUST put this film on my list about a week ago, I was going through the new additions for August on all the streaming services, according to the IMDB article (and August is usually a very slow month for this, because so many people are on vacation, even in Hollywood...). So it's been on my radar as a new Amazon Prime selection, but it moved RIGHT to the top of the list because it has Queen Latifah in it, and also Andy Garcia, who's on my list a bunch right now, including one back-to-school type movie, so this turned out to be JUST the film link I needed to move forward. Meanwhile, "Mad Money" was probably on my list for three or four years, really it's just the luck of the draw - I thought maybe "Mad Money" would help me link to "Cousins", which also has Ted Danson in it, but I found a way in February to cross that one off, leaving "Mad Money" sort of stranded. But then ending the Doc Block with "Marty, Life Is Short" brought me back around to Diane Keaton, and so "Mad Money" was rescued from an eternity on my watchlist, after all.
Taking a quick advance look at the September schedule, there aren't TOO many films that have been hanging around for a long time - "City Island", maybe which I had on my old DVR, the one that crashed horribly, taking about 73 movies down with it, but then about a year later some cable channel ran that movie again, so it was back in play. "Happly N'ever After 2" is a staple of the list, it shared no actors with the first film so it's been stuck on the list for a long time, but I think I can work it into a chain of 7 or 8 more recent animated additions, because why not watch 7 new films in an order that allows me to get rid of the one that's been stuck on my list forever? Hey, whatever it takes to open up a slot... The rest all seem to be recent action or action/comedy films, I think I see an opening to add a classic action/horror movie that I never even thought about trying to get to, but it seems relevant in a weird way to a recent Netflix film - I guess I'll explain when we get there at the end of the month. This is assuming the month goes as planned, which is never a certainty, although the whole Doc Block played out the way I thought it would, except for one film that I had to drop because the IMDB credits were wrong. That film will be first on my Doc Block planning list for next summer.
Queen Latifah carries over from "Mad Money".
THE PLOT: Black gangsters in 1930 Harlem fight Dutch Schultz, who is trying to horn in on their numbers racket.
AFTER: This film just seems very low-key and uninteresting, rather close to being dull. How do you make a crime film that doesn't feel exciting enough to be entertaining? It feels a bit like a made-for-TV movie because it's so boring, except for the few times that someone gets killed violently - that alone means it couldn't have been a TV movie, so you know, of course it's a movie movie, just not violent enough to be shocking, I guess. I mean, did nobody involved in the production of this 1997 film ever watch "The Godfather" or "Dog Day Afternoon", or even "Bonnie and Clyde"? Things are supposed to be fast-paced, tension-filled and there need to be shoot-outs about every five minutes, I mean, even in the 1990's people were starting to have shorter attention spans, and if you don't have an action scene every few minutes, people are going to start losing interest and then taking bathroom breaks, snack breaks, it won't be good. "Hoodlum" feels like it has long stretches where nothing happens and nobody's doing anything, which kind of brings the movie to a screeching halt, multiple times. And if we're not moving the plot forward, then what exactly ARE we doing?
Laurence Fishburne plays Harlem gangster "Bumpy" Johnson, who ends up butting heads with Manhattan mob bosses Dutch Schultz and Lucky Luciano, both of whom are looking to expand into Harlem territory. But the Numbers racket is crucial for the people in Harlem during the Depression, they play the game every day hoping to win, which would allow their families to eat better. Or, just putting that out there, they COULD have saved some money by NOT playing the numbers and used THAT money to buy food. The Numbers was just a rigged lottery, right? Like the gangsters took everyone's betting slips and then they looked for a number that week that nobody picked, and made THAT the winning number, right? This film makes it seem like Bumpy Johnson took over a long-running Numbers game from "The Queen" and then used some kind of arbitrary system like the daily stock market report to generate the numbers, but that mean if the market closed at a number that ended in 305, and 1,000 people in their pool had played that number, they had to pay out 1,000 jackpots, and sometimes they LOST money doing it this way. Jeezus, who runs an illegal gambling operation that loses money?
Why couldn't they have put a limit on how many people picked a certain number. "I'm sorry, but 30 people already picked the number 325, so you can't pick that one, please pick another number." How hard is THAT? It sounds like their organized crime wasn't as organized as it could have been... Anyway the Numbers game in Harlem was run by Madame Queen, and Bumpy worked for her, which is what brought him into conflict with Dutch Schultz and Lucky Luciano. The white mob bosses were looking to expand north, and in this film they send enforcers and assassins to take her out, but Bumpy and her other loyal employees fight back and repel them. Bumpy then robs Dutch Schultz's operation in retaliation and gives that money to Harlem residents, but Madame Queen is angry at him for making his own decisions to do that.
Schultz then hires two hitmen, the Salke brothers, to kill Bumpy, while also using his police contact, Captain Foley, to arrest Madame Queen. Bumpy and his girlfriend Francine manage to kill the hitmen, but this does end up having an effect on their relationship. But with the Queen in jail, Bumpy runs her Numbers racket and wages war against Dutch Schultz. While out at an ice cream parlor with Francine, Bumpy realizes his banana split has almonds on it, and also has been poisoned. The new soda jerk at the parlor was put in place by his associate Vallie, who was working for Bumpy's enemies, so Bumpy retaliates by making the soda jerk eat the poisoned ice cream. Then he has Vallie killed and brings his finger to Dutch Schultz at the Cotton Club, demanding that Dutch Schultz stay out of Harlem, but that does not go over well.
So Bumpy and his cohort Illinois deliver a few boxes of dynamite to one of Dutch's illegal breweries downtown, pretending to be delivering yeast for the beer-making. Bumpy and Illinois barely manage to drive their truck away before the whole place explodes, and really their nervousness and the dialogue between them and the loading dock employees is quite awful, from an acting standpoint. But anyway, the gangsters get invited to a meeting held by Lucky Luciano to try and work everything out. Yeah, that doesn't really go well, either. The white gangsters capture and torture Illinois, and after Bumpy's men find his corpse, they entrap and kill that white police Captain.
Bumpy's girlfriend Francine leaves him, I guess that night at the ice cream parlor was just too stressful for her. And Bumpy pretends to partner up with Luciano against Schultz, or at least that's what they want Schultz to think so he'll go crazy and try to break up the meeting between their accountants. But that meeting with the accountants wasn't real, just a piece of information they leaked to Schultz through a driver. Instead they had already paid off Dutch Schultz's bodyguard to bump him off, and I guess they paid him enough to do it. But this was pretty confusing, because Bumpy and Lucky only pretended to team up against Schultz, but in doing that, weren't they also actually teaming up against Schultz? I'm not seeing the benefit they got out of pretending to do the thing that they were also doing.
But, with Dutch Schultz out of the way, that meant that Bumpy could keep running crime in Harlem, Luciano could keep running crime in Manhattan, and Hewlett, the black guy who was working with Schultz could now do something different and not work for a racist any more. Umm, yay? It's hard to call this a win for anyone here because they're all just going to keep doing illegal things and taking advantage of people everywhere until there's another gang war or they die in some other way. What am I missing here?
I think they retold this whole story again in 2019 in a cable show called "Godfather of Harlem", with Forest Whitaker playing Bumpy Johnson. So I guess I'm just here for the linking today, that's all I'm really getting out of it.
Directed by Bill Duke (director of "Deep Cover" (1992) and "Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit")
Also starring Laurence Fishburne (last seen in "Earth, Wind & Fire"), Tim Roth (last seen in "When We Went MAD!"), Vanessa Williams (last seen in "Eraser"), Andy Garcia (last seen in "ABBA: Super Troupe"), Cicely Tyson (last seen in "Being Eddie"), Chi McBride (last seen in "Draft Day"), Clarence Williams III (last seen in "Deep Cover" (1992)), Richard Bradford (last seen in "The Mean Season"), William Atherton (last seen in "Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire"), Loretta Devine (last seen in "Queen Bees"), Mike Starr (last seen in "A Shock to the System"), Beau Starr (last seen in "Code Name: The Cleaner"), Paul Benjamin (last seen in "Some Kind of Hero"), Joe Guzaldo (last seen in "The Package"), Eddie Bo Smith Jr. (ditto), Ed O'Ross (last heard in "Curious George 2: Follow That Monkey!"), J.W. Smith (also last seen in "Deep Cover"), John Toles-Bey, David Darlow (last seen in "Let's Go to Prison"), Ellis Foster (ditto), Juan Ramirez (ditto), Steve Pickering, Bill Henderson (last seen in "Cousins"), Tony Fitzpatrick (last seen in "Primal Fear"), Joe Caballero (ditto), Robert Cornelius, Tab Baker (last seen in "Save the Last Dance"), Joe Van Slyke, Daniel Bryant, Don James, Sulanya Conway, Christian Payton, Jackie Taylor, Dick Gjonola, David Nisbet, Nancy Nickel, Marc Vann (last seen in "Payback"), Colin Bradley Sylvester, Leonard Roberts (last seen in "Savages"), John M. Watson Sr., Michael McCary, Tony Powell, Kevyn Morrow, Tony Rich,
RATING: 4 out of 10 places in NYC to get good cheesecake
