Extra! Billy Bathgate Lives!

By RICHARD CORLISS

It hurt that gate was in the title. Watergate. Heaven's Gate. Billy Bathgate. As the production of E.L. Doctorow's best seller went over budget and reportedly out of whack, bathgate is what Hollywood figured the Disney studio would take -- in red ink -- when the film finally opened. Its summer premiere was postponed; last month a new ending was shot (then discarded); stories surfaced of clashes between director Robert Benton and his star, Dustin Hoffman. Oh, and Bruce Willis was in it, so it must be a dog.

Quite a few locals took pleasure in the rancorous rumors. For years Disney had been No. 1, but with a bullet of industry-wide resentments aimed at its heart. The studio's bosses were crass, they were meddlers, they were way too successful for way too long: Michael Milkens as movie moguls. Anticipating that Billy B. might be a Bonfire-size bomb, Hollywood went dancing at its favorite spot: on the coffin of a hated rival.

Well, so what? Before Kevin Costner's smash Dances with Wolves opened, the town's grumble bunnies were calling it Kevin's Gate. Which is not to predict that Billy B. will be a hit; it lacks, by design, the grapefruit-in-your-face impact of most gangster classics. But this is superior filmmaking, as handsomely conceived and realized as Dick Tracy, but darker, more resonant. It has a grace and a gravity rare just now in American films. Oh, and Willis, as a high-living hoodlum, is one dandy dandy.

The trick of Doctorow's novel -- a meditation on '30s Mob boss Dutch Schultz -- was in its narrative voice. Young Billy, from Bathgate Avenue in the Bronx, was the ideal observer: a talisman for the gang, a kind of underworld groupie who is appreciative of their style and implicated in their actions but still one ironic step outside their souls, and who is ready to analyze every movement and moment in 484 pages of headlong streetwise orotundity and subordinate clauses even longer than this one. Tom Stoppard's script daringly dumps that voice (there is no voice-over narration) and puts its trust in other eloquences: Doctorow's story and dialogue, the actors' faces, Benton's tactful direction.

This movie respects the viewer, and what pleasures that affords! In the first scene, look closely as Billy (Loren Dean, a find) stares at an older gangster, and imagine in their facial resemblance the kind of dead-end foot soldier the boy could become in 10 years, if he were not as lucky as he proves to be. Catch the cool stare of society dame Drew Preston (Nicole Kidman), the captive, then mistress, of Dutch (Hoffman); her eyes don't move from his as he submits her face to the indignity of a first caress. Listen to the whisper of silk against silk as Drew sashays toward Billy on the night they might make love. From such subtle signals emerges a lopsided triangle: the strong man and two people independent enough to survive him. Billy had first caught Dutch's attention when he juggled four balls on a railroad overpass. But he and Drew are both jugglers, really, of other people's emotions -- even those of Dutch, whose primal whims toward these two outsiders are to adopt one and have the other killed.

Despite Hoffman's wonderfully gruff, implosive star performance -- he is so in tune with Dutch's desperation that even his murderous rages are sullen -- this is at heart a movie about the power of a beautiful, fearless woman. In Kidman, an improbable amalgam of Sigourney Weaver and Melanie Griffith, Benton found Drew's embodiment. Toward the end, when she flies out of two men's lives, she seems an airborne goddess of artful deceit.

May Billy B.'s grosses take such flight.