Product Details
- Starring: Dennis Farina
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- Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
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- Binding: VHS Tape
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- Director: Ben Burtt
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- EAN: 9786302426427
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- Format: Black & White, Color, NTSC
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- ISBN: 6302426421
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- Label: Sony Pictures
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- Manufacturer: Sony Pictures
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- Number of Items: 1
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- Product Group: Video
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- Publisher: Sony Pictures
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- Release Date: 1994-06-21
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- Studio: Sony Pictures
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- Title: American Gangster
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- UPC: 043396510630
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Avg Customer Rating: 
Product Description: The history of organized crime in America is given a lively treatment in this video narrated by actor Dennis Farina. The focus is on Charles "Lucky" Luciano and his longtime associate Meyer Lansky, who were both tutored by legendary gambler Arnold Rothstein and went on to amass power and riches during the years of Prohibition. Ancillary characters, including Al Capone and Ben "Bugsy" Siegel, are profiled in some depth, and other outlaws of the day, such as John Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd, killers who gathered headlines while the real mobsters quietly consolidated their influence, are mentioned in passing. The video is consistently entertaining, though one criticism is that some of the inside knowledge it purports to relate, such as the identities of triggermen in notable New York City hits in the late 1920s, is rooted more in myth than fact. But despite the occasional excess, the narration does mostly stick to the facts as they are known, and the story of how a few uneducated teenagers from the ethnic slums of New York came to control a virtual empire of crime by the 1950s is very well told. --Robert J. McNamara
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