Barry Levinson's gangster biopic Bugsy was the most nominated movie at the 1991 Oscars, ten nods in total, including Picture, Director, and Actor. While most of the big categories were won by The Silence of the Lambs, Levinson's picture still took home two statuettes. They were for Best Art Direction-Set Decoration and Best Costume Design, rightful rewards for a glamourous recreation of 1940s Hollywood and the nascent Las Vegas. Unlike Dennis Gassner, Nancy Haigh, and Albert Wolsky, the movie's star left the Academy Awards ceremony with no new little golden man of his own. Nonetheless, Warren Beatty might have gotten a greater reward out of Bugsy than any of the Oscared cineastes.
After all, it was during the shooting of Bugsy that the man once considered to be Hollywood's hottest bachelor finally met his match and future wife, the one and only Annette Bening…
While Beatty had been a Hollywood powerhouse since the 1960s, The Bening's career only started to flourish by the very end of the 80s. Milos Forman's Valmont was her big breakthrough in 1989, offering an effervescent take on the same character that had earned Glenn Close an Oscar nomination the previous year. Bening earned no such golden accolades for her Marquise de Merteuil, but things changed quickly. In 1990, Stephen Frears' The Grifters allowed the actress to channel both Gloria Grahame and Marilyn Monroe with a film noir sex kitten for which she'd score an Oscar nomination. It was around the same time that she was first contacted by Warren Beatty.
He was casting his latest grand opus, a brightly colored big-screen adaptation of the Dick Tracy comics, and Bening was a possible choice for his love interest. The part was ultimately won by Glenne Headly, though Bening didn't put up much of a fight. She didn't even show up for an appointment with Beatty, canceling it to meet her ex-husband in New York. Their first real meeting would happen only when they got involved with the Bugsy Siegel biopic. According to Beatty's own words, he was so enthralled by her, during an early work lunch, that he forgot the food on his plate. Even so, he's sworn that their relationship during production was strictly professional, and, only after they wrapped, did he ask Bening to dinner. She said yes.
Whatever the state of their personal affairs was by the time of the filming, their onscreen chemistry is scorching. Virginia Hill and Bugsy Siegel meet on the set of 1941's Manpower, but their romance depicted in Bugsy has a sexually charged dynamic that would have been hard to pass through the censors of a Hays Code-abiding Hollywood. Wrapped in clingy gold lamé (that is nothing like what the real Virginia Hill wore), Bening ends her first conversation with Beatty by telling him to jerk himself a soda. Later on, her reactions to the criminal's violent ways are nothing short of lustful ecstasy. So torrid is their combined screen presence that the actors generate a fascinating tension between the love-crazed characters and the glitzy old-fashioned stylings of the picture.
A month after Bugsy's December 1991 premiere, Annette Bening was giving birth to her and Beatty's first child. They were married by March 2nd, 1992, just in time to attend the 64th Academy Awards as a newly married couple. Still, for all their electrifying onscreen chemistry, both stars remained decidedly private and rarely capitalized on their actorly dynamic. During their near three decades of wedded life, Bening and Beatty have only shared the screen two more times, and in just one of those collaborations were their characters romantically involved. Weirdly enough, there's a stylistic, at least aesthetic, through-line connecting these three pictures beyond the pairing, including Bugsy.
As previously mentioned, the '91 flick indulges in the aesthetic of Old Hollywood glamour, but so do their latter projects. 1994's Love Affair is the third version of the story originally immortalized by Irene Dunne and Charles Boyer in 1939, and by Deborah Kerr and Cary Grant in 1957. What's most fascinating about that lachrymose romance is how director Glenn Gordon Caron indulges in antiquated cinematic mechanisms and romantic archetypes, to a farther extent than even the '39 movie. Just notice how Conrad L. Hall films the two stars, all soft-lighting and Vaseline smeared lenses, or how Ennio Morricone's tinkling score underlines every sentimental peak with unashamed schmaltz. As for The Bening and her husband, they're fine, but the movie's easily stolen by Katharine Hepburn in a one-sequence cameo as Beatty's elderly aunt.
Opportunities for the couple to work together dwindled after the 90s, as Beatty became increasingly removed from filmmaking. It was in 2016 that he returned to the movie business, both in front and behind the camera, with the romantic comedy Rules Don't Apply. In it, he plays an aged Howard Hughes during the late 50s, while Lily Collins and Alden Ehrenreich give life to a couple of ambitious youths under the employment of the millionaire. The movie's many connections to Hollywood history are fascinating and its aesthetic recalls midcentury melodramas. If midcentury melodramas had been cut by trailer editors on a cocaine binge, that is. Unfortunately, while Beatty may be a generous scene partner when acting with Annette Bening, he's not a very giving director or screenwriter. Indeed, saddled with the role of Lilly Collins' strict mother, The Bening is wasted in Rules Don't Apply.
I sincerely hope this isn't the last time the couple acts together because it's a rather dour note to end their screen partnership on. Would you be excited about a new movie starring The Bening and Beatty?
Bugsy is available to rent from Amazon, Apple iTunes, Google Play, and others. You can stream Love Affair on Vudu Free and Pluto TV, and Rules Don't Apply on realeyz.