Coincidentally, at the same time that American Gangster appears (see this month’s film review), Magnolia Films releases Mister Untouchable, a documentary about one of Frank Lucas’s competitors, the more famous and visible Nicky Barnes. Barnes, however, got his drugs from the Italian Mafia, and had a large but fragile network…many of whose dumber members were just waiting to dethrone him.

Lucas figures only briefly in Mister Untouchable, about 45 minutes in, where his role in Harlem drug pushing is minimized and his dress sense is ridiculed. The club they both attended, Smalls, makes another cameo, though. Like Lucas, however, when the law finally closed in, Barnes turned snitch and betrayed all those with whom he had risen to the top. Barnes, who has been in the witness protection program and appears in the movie shielded, remains arrogant and egotistical to the end, his apparently flexible loyalty now flipped to his government protectors.

Mister Untouchable offers a cursory, whirlwind tour of Barnes’s life and works and takes what you could call the Law and Order position on Barnes’s sins, i.e., that it’s okay to revel in the misdeeds for an hour, but ultimately only a prosecutor’s office is the real hero, with its wiretaps and undercover agents and entrapment schemes. As the late Murray Kempton (who as a New York columnist followed Nicky Barnes’s career closely and with a sneaking sympathy) once wrote, Barnes “bestrode Central Harlem like a Colossus,” but Mister Untouchable prefers to take the modern view and present him as an OG, a player, not a cunning and callous business man up against the most vicious gang imaginable, the U. S. Attorneys Office.

Still, Mister Untouchable has its horrible momentary pleasures, such as a sighting of The Claw, a drug addled denizen of Harlem impervious to low doses of H and who thus served as a quality control drug tester for Barnes’s lieges. The Claw’s left arm was infected to thrice its size but he lived happily off its poisons (according to a lieutenant whom Barnes later betrayed) until one night in the emergency room surgeons cut it off and The Claw promptly died.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 7th, 2007 at 6:22 pm and is filed under Reel Politique - Film columnist DK Holm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.