Bad guys aim to make it good at the box office

They say crime doesn't pay...but Hollywood is hoping to make a killing at the box office with the new gangster movie Hoodlum.

And producer Frank Mancuso Jr. has called up the big guns for his tale of the battle for Harlem's illegal, but lucrative numbers racket in the Thirties.

Calling the shots are Andy Garcia, w'ho cut his teeth in the gangster business in Godfather III, Tim Roth, the hold-up man in Pulp Fiction, and Laurence Fishburne, another bad guy in The King of New York. In Hoodlum, Garcia stars as Murder Incorporated crime boss Lucky Luciano, Roth as mobster Dutch Schultz and Fishburne as underworld kingpin Ellsworth "Bumpy" Johnson.

All three mobsters are battling for the same patch of turf. But while in the movie it's supposed to be Harlem, New York, it's really Chicago, Illinois.

"The movie is based on fact but the actual locations have changed dramatically since the Thirties," said line producer Vikki Williams. "But Chicago fitted what we wanted - both uptown and downtown."

Director Bill Duke denies Hoodlum is just a men's movie with Vanessa Williams starring as Johnson's mesmerizing moll Francine Hughes" and Cicely Tyson as Harlem numbers bigwig, Stephanie "Queen of Policy"' St. Clair.

"And Francine's not just a piece of 'arm candy',"' said Duke, sounding as if he's just walked out of a New York speakeasy.

"She's a complicated mixture of corruptible innocence and softness with an imperceptible edge.

"In the end, Johnson only feels emotionally and physically safe with Francine."

But any lingering image of tough guys getting to grips with their inner feelings is blown apart by the film's special effects supremo, Bill Johnson.

To him, there's nothing quite as pretty as that sudden burst of red you get with a bullet to the head.

"In Hoodlum,"we've got bullet hits, a shotgun blast taking off part of somebody's head and severed body parts,"" said Johnson, leaving nobody in any doubt that this is first and last a gangster movie.

"What was really cool was that director Bill Duke gave me the opportunity to suggest effects. He was always saying, 'Let's try to do something different'."'

And Johnson was always prepared to go that bit further, even quizzing the local coroner about shotgun wounds - all in the interests of authenticity.

"For the shotgun blast the original script said the guy's head just disappeared in a pink mist while the decapitated body fell over," said Johnson.

"But I called a coroner on the phone, talked to him for a while, and looked through some books I have of dead bodies. The thing is, shotgun blasts don't usually take your head off. They'll pulverize the skull so that the whole face distorts, and then it will blow out the back of the head.

"They call it a'mushroom effect and we pulled it off to perfection.""

Producer Mancuso prefers not to go in so much detail about Hoodlum, which opens here in November.

"It's a compelling, strongly dramatic experience about a group of people that you may not want exactly as your friends," he said. "From an emotional point of view, it'will take you all over the place.""

Quite.

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