`HOODLUM' AN OFFER YOU CAN REFUSE.

Byline: Joe Baltake Scripps-McClatchy Western Service

Director Bill Duke has a solid gangster film in the badly titled ``Hoodlum,'' but there's little doubt that this familiar crime movie would be a lot more impressive if Francis Ford Coppola's ``The Godfather'' never had existed.

The cliches of the gangster genre already were in place when Coppola made ``The Godfather'' back in 1972. What Coppola did, however, was to stretch them out, making them all seem bigger and grander. A lot of it was hot air, to be sure, but dipped in honey-coated cinematography, ``The Godfather'' brought a certain legitimacy and a luxuriant quality to an otherwise low-brow, rat-a-tat-tat film form. The critics called it operatic - and it is.

It's a majestic film.

``Hoodlum,'' on the other hand, is closer to an operetta, which isn't bad. It has much of the same burnished look and hot air, but it's a small film that only aspires to bigness and greatness, never quite making it. While the goings-on in ``The Godfather'' were akin to a smoothly run big business, ``Hoodlum'' is simply petty crime - small potatoes.

Dealing with a turf war over the ownership of the numbers racket in 1930s Harlem, Duke's film dubiously tries to do for African-Americans what ``The Godfather'' did for Italian Americans and what Sergio Leone's ``Once Upon a Time in America'' (1984) did for Jewish Americans.

Just as Coppola and Leone glamorized their amoral characters, Duke exaggerates matters, taking a footnote in crime history and making it seem bigger and better than it probably ever was. To accomplish this, he's appropriated factual material and systematically fictionalized it, inventing characters who never existed.

But there's probably some veracity to the core of the film, which was inspired by the life of Ellsworth ``Bumpy'' Johnson, a small-time Harlem hood who spent most of his early years in assorted prisons.

Laurence Fishburne plays Bumpy, continuing a role he started 13 years ago in Coppola's ``The Cotton Club'' (1984), where the character was called Bumpy Rhodes. It's an interesting bit of movie history and may account for the total, quiet confidence Fishburne brings to the role.

Anyway, when he was released from Sing Sing prison in 1934, Bumpy came home to find that Dutch Schultz (Tim Roth) and his downtown gang had come uptown and muscled in on Harlem's numbers racket, which was always the exclusive domain of a colorful character named Stephanie St. Claire. St. Claire, played by Cicely Tyson with an arch accent and a nice air of pretension, liked to call herself ``The Queen,'' and so did everyone who attended her.

The movie is initially about Bumpy's attempts to aid the Queen and protect both her and his home town. However, later, when Schultz pays off a crooked police officer (Richard Bradford, as a cop who never existed) to get the Queen tossed in the slammer, Bumpy is forced to take over her operation.

Up to that point, Bumpy worked simply within his own limited resources, depending on the loyalty of his cousin, the affable Illinois Gordon (played by Chi McBride, who's excellent). He was strictly small-time. But when he's bumped up to the position of king of Harlem's numbers racket, Bumpy plays it safe and smart, aligning himself with another noted downtown gangster, Lucky Luciano (Andy Garcia).

Roth scurries through the film, knocking things and people over, while he barks out a torrent of profanities. He's hugely entertaining. Garcia, who affects a lazy right eye for the role of Luciano, provides the film with a requisite, old-fashioned movie-star allure. But, befitting this particular movie, it's the smaller performances and smaller moments that command attention. Tyson, McBride, Loretta DeVine as McBride's honey, Queen Latifah as a neighborhood woman and, especially Clarence Williams III as Schultz's token African-American assistant, are all indelible.

THE FACTS

The film: ``Hoodlum'' (R; violence, profanity, nudity).

The stars: Laurence Fishburne, Vanessa Williams, Tim Roth, Andy Garcia, Cicely Tyson, Chi McBride, Loretta Devine, Queen Latifah and Clarence Williams III.

Behind the scenes: Directed by Bill Duke. Written by Chris Brancato. Released by MGM/UA.

Running time: Two hours, 12 minutes.

Playing: Citywide.

Our rating: Two and One Half Stars.