Film - Jonathan Romney tires of the cinema's obsession with the gangster genre
Just as the Kray brothers were famed for loving and respecting their old mum, the current British gangster cult is obsessed with father figures. Once terrifying hard men have been domesticated into roguish patriarchs, scowling men's mag-style icons in their car coats and Savile Row suits - the Krays themselves; the jovial raconteur Mad Frankie Fraser; Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels bit player Lenny the Guv'nor McLean; and, in the cinema, Michael Caine in Get Carter and The Italian Job and Bob Hoskins in The Long Good Friday. Rough diamonds, every one. But it's all getting bloody repetitive, not to say Oedipal.
No wonder, then, that the director Paul McGuigan describes his new film, Gangster No 1, as "like a Greek tragedy" - its story is Oedipus writ large, in Gents' wall graffiti. It's a relief, however, to see a British gangster film in tragic mode; the comic mode has altogether exhausted itself, what with the witless larkiness of Lock, Stock and its Sun-sponsored Channel 4 spin-off. Gangster No 1, style- fixated though it is, has a grasp of the realities of violence, to a quite Jacobean extent. If much of it feels second-hand, this return-to-roots film at least takes on its models more explicitly, and more critically, than the usual recycling jobs.
The Gangster is a young London thug on the make in the 1960s (Paul Bettany), who ends up as a lizard-like old monarch in decline (Malcolm McDowell). We follow the kid's ascent from cocky foot soldier to smoothly suited-up, self-made man, then to spoilt tyrant. He gets to the top by betraying his boss, Freddie Mays; now, after a long prison spell, the deposed king is to be released, and the pretender awaits his own downfall. The story, scripted by Johnny Ferguson from a stage play by Louis Mellis and David Scinto, is perhaps too bare-bones mechanical for Greek tragedy: the conflict is between the cocky pretender, unable to back up his aspirations with grandeur of soul, and the deposed tyrant, cruel yet innately noble, if only because he knows how to wear a tiepin.
"Style" is the key term - films such as Gangster No 1 are no longer about moral issues, but portray a world in which life and death hang on the ability to "carry it off". It's a process that began in the 1960s, with the photographic transformation of the Krays into de facto pop stars. The young Gangster is "class", but only up to a point: he can walk it and talk it, and look as if he belongs on a 1967 British R&B record sleeve, but he's flawed by his inability to rein in the madness, to stop himself getting bloody. Freddie Mays, decadent and due for a fall, nevertheless emerges with dignity because he never lets the violence taint him; played by David Thewlis with eccentric feline elegance, Mays is a Roman emperor among villains, his manicured chic oddly recalling that Sixties icon of upmarket loucheness, Kenneth Tynan.
McGuigan, who did a messy, hysterical job on the Irvine Welsh portmanteau The Acid House, here pulls out the stops more stylishly, with a flashy but to-the-point barrage of trick effects: a touch of Martin Scorsese, a dash of The Thomas Crown Affair. The Sixties and Seventies iconography is always familiar, echoing everything from the sharply groomed Stanley Baker onwards. Bettany more than looks the part: blond and icy-eyed, he has only to walk down a corridor to recall Lee Marvin stomping with bloody intent in John Boorman's Point Blank.
The echoes of Performance, the most perverse of all gangster films, are heightened by Bettany's resemblance to James Fox. One scene recalls Fox's own stripping-bare and descent into Artaudian extremity: arriving for a murder, the Gangster methodically lays out his hacksaws and hammers, then carefully strips to his underwear, hanging up his natty clothes to keep them pristine. Then he goes berserk, and the camera gives us a point-of-view experience of what it's like to be his victim: to be sent crashing into the drinks cabinet, to black out, then be revived for more. We're left with Bettany slumped on a sofa in shorts and vest, steeped in gore, drained of humanity.
Much of the rest is by-the-book geezerology: old toe-rags barking "Do me a fay-vah!"; the retro knees-up with Sixties soul on the Dansette; and trusty old Kenneth Cranham balefully guarding the cheese-and-pineapple sticks. As Mays's moll Karen, Saffron Burrows breathes wounded conviction into what would otherwise be a flat, noble-tart role. And there's a wonderful bit of set-dressing - Philip Elton's sunken-courtyard design for Mays's HQ, which gives the film an ominous, ancient Rome touch.
The real flaw is the casting of McDowell as the old Gangster. He's there not because he's right, but because he's an icon, an authentic relic of the period, carrying his own past as an epoch-defining teenage thug in A Clockwork Orange. But it's hard to believe in the razor-crisp Bettany becoming this wheezy old roarer with his gnarled punchbag features. British cinema loves its icons, especially its wicked patriarchs, because they always make for convenient shorthand, and because it seems so little able to invent new myths of its own. Gangster No 1 makes the most of that dearth of new images; it's several cuts above the rest, but it's still not much more than a dazzling parade of dead bad dads. It's probably about time they had a rest.
Gangster No 1 (18) is released 9 June at the Warner West End and Virgin Haymarket, London
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