American Gangster

Gangster movies come in vivid spurts, like machine-gun fire. In the early '30s, hard guys like James Cagney, Paul Muni and Edward G. Robinson paraded the sick dazzle of Prohibition-era thugs. Forty years later, the Corleones ruled, but on the margins was the subgenre of black gangster films: Superfly, Black Caesar and their bloody kin. Beneath the violent fantasies of these films was a historical fact: black mobsters were seizing power from the Italians who had run the underworld.

American Gangster, due out Nov. 2, is the real-life microcosm of that story. Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington) was a Harlem drug lord who, in the Vietnam era, revolutionized the heroin trade by importing the nasty white stuff directly from Southeast Asia, often in the caskets of U.S. soldiers. As Lucas amassed a $50 million fortune, he was pursued by investigator Richie Roberts (Russell Crowe). Their story was told in a 2000 New York magazine article that is the source for this film.

Director Ridley Scott and scriptwriter Steven Zaillian (who last collaborated on Hannibal) aren't your standard shoot-'em-up types, so they'll be painting Lucas as a prototype of white-collar criminals and, even more crucially, highlighting the element of race in the heroin business. The Mafia considered blacks its customers, not its rivals. Lucas and the more notorious Nicky Barnes (played here by Cuba Gooding Jr.) changed all that.

The movie surely has another motive. The three stars and Zaillian are all Academy Award winners, as is producer Brian Grazer (for A Beautiful Mind), and Scott helmed Gladiator to a Best Picture statuette. So all involved are hoping that Gangster's guns will still be blazing on Oscar night.

—RICHARD CORLISS