By Curt Schleier

A good movie grabs you by the guts.  A very good movie grabs your brain.  And a great movie does both.  AMERICAN GANGSTER is great.

It’s a suspenseful action- and violence-packed film.  But it’s also a morality play that takes place in that gray area where you can’t tell the good guys from the bad and right from wrong. 

On the one had, you have Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington), a real-life drug dealers who flooded Harlem with cocaine in the early 1970s.  On the other, you have Richie Roberts (Russell Crowe), the cop who brought him down.  Ironically, they have more in common than not, including Horatio Alger pasts and single minded determination to succeed.

The first time you see Lucas, he puts a match to an enemy he’d doused with lighter fluid and then pumps several bullets into him.  Later, in the middle of the day on a busy Harlem street, he cold bloodedly murders a competitor.  Lucas just puts a gun to the man’s head, fires and calmly walks back to the restaurant where he’d been eating to finish his meal.

Clearly, Lucas is evil incarnate.  But there is something else almost admirable about him.  He built a large business from scratch by supplying a better product at a cheaper price.  He cut the middleman out and created an operation that could easily serve as a case history for the Harvard Business Review.  And he did all in the face of potentially lethal competition.

To get product, he went to Thailand and arranged for regular large shipments.  To get it to the States, he paid off soldiers and arranged to have the coke transported in military transports in the coffins of dead soldiers returning from Vietnam.  He had competition from the Mafia, so he cut his prices, sold a better (i.e. purer) product, literally driving the mob from Harlem.  Part of his success, in fact, was that at first no law enforcement agency came after him; prosecutors didn’t believe that a black man could outwit the mob at its own game. Lucas – to use a popular business expression – thought outside the box.


He brought his family up from the south to help run his company and told them: “The most important thing in business is honesty, integrity and hard work.  Never forget where we came from.”

There’s something appealing about a crook who plays by the rules – even if you don’t like the game.

Roberts played by the rules, too, and that’s what got him in trouble.  A detective in the Newark, N.J. P.D., he recovered nearly $1 million in dirty money and turned every penny in.  The prevailing wisdom in the department was that a guy that honest couldn’t be trusted.  He’d turn them in too.

A pariah in his own department, he was eventually appointed to a federal drug task force and with a select team of honest cops brought Lucas down.

But Lucas wasn’t his only enemy. Though Lucas put out a contract on his life, Richards faced greater danger from crooked cops who wanted the drug traffic to continue because it was making them rich.  There was a particularly bad group of New York City detectives, who not only took bribes, but at one point invaded Lucas’ home and tore it apart looking for cash.


Everything came together in this film.  It started with a great story.  Steve Zaillian (SCHINDLER’S LIST, SEARCHING FOR BOBBY FISCHER) wrote a great screenplay.  One of the best action directors in the business, Ridley Scott (BLADE RUNNER, ALIEN, GLADIATOR, BLACK HAWK DOWN) took the reins and created a masterpiece. 

And finally two of the generation’s finest actors at the top of their form worked together, seemingly without ego.  This is one of the finest films of the year.