It’s Getting to Be a Real Mob Scene

A mensch of a mobster.

That’s HBO’s Meyer Lansky, the notorious Jewish racketeer and casino owner who consorted with Lucky Luciano and Bugsy Siegel while rubbing wallets and shoulders with the murderous elite of organized crime.

It’s less the underworld, though, than anti-Semitism that defines the Richard Dreyfuss-played protagonist who leaves his heart somewhere near Jerusalem’s Western Wall in the so-so “Lansky.”

In prime time, HBO’s own heart is partly in crime, this movie extending its fascination with powerful wiseguys that began with a 1996 biography of jailed-for-life Mafia chief John Gotti and continued this season with the fictionalized family values of its dandy new series “The Sopranos.”

HBO can have all the mediocre “Lanskys” it wants--and more--as long as it keeps “The Sopranos” breathing indefinitely. More about that irresistible New Jersey crime bunch shortly.

How ironic to be drawn so consistently to what we loathe. Hollywood learned long ago that when it comes to luring large audiences, make a mob and they will come. From that landmark Jimmy Cagney movie “The Public Enemy” nearly seven decades ago, to the present, the string is unbroken.

Despite national hand wringing about it, organized crime is the badness on the screen that Americans love to hate, which accounts for viewer fixation on those shamelessly bloody, brain-dead miniseries “The Last Don” and “The Last Don II,” which yielded gaudy ratings for CBS for the last two years by waggling their body counts the way streetwalkers do their tushies.

There’s no such pandering by HBO’s latest mob film--give it credit for that, at least. The David Mamet script opens with a 70-year-old Lansky in Jerusalem a decade before his death in 1980, embracing Israel like a true believer while waiting to hear if he will be kicked out or allowed to live there permanently. The history speaks for itself. He’ll be deported, ultimately winding up back in the U.S. and in the grasp of FBI investigators.

Before that happens, Mamet, the Pulitzer Prize-winning screenwriter, gives Lansky time to reflect on his life through flashbacks, starting with his rough youth on New York’s mean streets where the Polish immigrant grew into a young man with a head for “business.”

That business was crime. And following Ryan Merriman as Meyer the boy and Max Perlich (in a bad hairpiece) as Meyer the 20-year-old, Dreyfuss is Lansky the mature criminal, using his noodle to make millions for his Mafia pals and himself. And using his membership in the inner circle with Luciano (Anthony LaPaglia) to help decide turf disputes and the targets of assassinations, one being his childhood homeboy, the volatile Siegel (Eric Roberts), whom he is unable to save.

There’s not much about “Lansky” that either grips you or connects the dots definitively. Director John McNaughton does keep things moving, though, and Dreyfuss is a credible Lansky if you believe this largely sympathetic character is Lansky, the actor’s best moments coming as that old man in Jerusalem hoping to mingle asylum with Judaism.

Because Mamet’s Lansky straddles good and evil so ambivalently, you don’t know whether to daven with him or deck him. In fact, the movie is arguably less about a crook than a Jew shaped by the hypocrisy and bigotry said to have tormented Lansky throughout his life, a softening picture that’s abetted sentimentally by a hybrid musical theme best described as “Godfather on the Roof.”

This Lansky shares with the “Teflon Don” of “Gotti” a twisted patriotism, a belief in the morality of his own corruption and deep feelings of persecution, seeing in every threat from the feds an act of anti-Semitism as savage as the pogroms that victimized his family in Europe. It’s a paranoia that the movie appears keen to accept as valid, and in seeking to dispel one mythology of Lansky as a sinister villain, may be erecting another.

Way, way up in the heavens, meanwhile, David Chase’s “The Sopranos” creates a mythic Mafia of its own, but one whose detailed cross-stitching of minutiae and malevolence is enormously seductive and entertaining. To say nothing of being a truly original work, one that began great last month and is getting even better, using superb scripts and accomplished actors to zoom depictions of organized thuggery to levels of art rarely attained on TV.

“The Sopranos” thrives on enigma, giving distinctive, textured life to its beguiling characters by juxtaposing wit and wickedness and by seamlessly fusing plot points that are contradictory. On a recent episode, while visiting snooty Eastern campuses with his college-bound daughter, Meadow (Jamie Lynn Sigler), for example, Prozac-popping mob boss Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) took time to gruesomely whack a guy in the federal witness protection program. Then he and Meadow went home.

Meadow now knows that “waste management,” as Tony defines it euphemistically, is not what her father really does for a living, but doesn’t seem to care as long as she attends the school of her choice. And her little brother, Anthony Jr. (Robert Idler), is on the verge of figuring it out, something that concerns Tony and his lusty wife, Carmela (Edie Falco), a lonely but formidable figure who has romantic thoughts about their parish priest.

There are elements of Cagney’s casually brutal Irish hoodlum, Tom Powers, in Tony, who can be counted on for one seething rampage per episode. Yet tempering that are the self-doubts and neuroses that he reveals little by little to his therapist (Lorraine Bracco), whose inscrutability is now drooping, especially after being told by Tony that he loves her.

This is some tapestry of characters, one also including Tony’s entourage of mugs; his hotheaded nephew Christopher (Michael Imperioli), who is writing a crime screenplay; his dangerous Uncle Junior (Dominic Chianese), who is Tony’s rival and the crime family’s titular don; and his kvetching, coldblooded mother, Livia (Nancy Marchand), whose capacity for lethal mischief should not be underestimated.

Learning from Anthony Jr. that Tony is seeing a psychiatrist--a sign of weakness, perhaps?--Livia will pass on that tidbit to Uncle Junior, whose interest portends problems for his nephew. And somehow you care.

Forget “Lansky.” This is a mobster to love.

If the Emmys don’t reward “The Sopranos” with a bunch of nominations--for the show and for Gandolfini, Falco and Marchand at least--then whack the Emmys.

* “Lansky” airs on HBO at 8 p.m. on Saturday. The network has rated it TV-MA/LS (suitable for mature audiences with special advisories for language and sexual content).