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Gangster No. 1

2000, Movie, 103 mins

Gangster No. 1: Review

GANGSTER NO. 1
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The shadows of PERFORMANCE (1970) and the flash reign of the notorious Kray twins hang heavily over this tale of the violent rise of a London crook. The film opens in the present day at a swank boxing event attended by rough-hewn middle-aged men in dinner jackets, swilling champagne and laughing coarsely at private jokes. The nameless gangster (Malcolm McDowell) hears that someone named Freddie is getting out of jail, and the film flashes back to 1968, when the young gangster (Paul Bettanny) got his big break from sleek crime lord Freddie Mays (David Thewlis), the "Butcher of Mayfair." Freddie hires him on the strength of his reputation as a hard man who's good in a crisis, and the gangster takes one look at Freddie's life and knows he wants it. The bachelor pad with the shag carpeting and the leather couches, the Italian suits, the flashy jewelry, the grudging respect of civilians and criminal cronies alike — it's like a drug. He begins to dress like Freddie, mimics his cool swagger and studies the calm yet vaguely menacing way Freddie deals with rivals like Lennie Taylor (Jamie Foreman). He's a quick study, and Freddie rewards the gangster by making him his right hand man. And then a woman gets between them, a dolly girl named Karen (Saffron Burroughs) who charms Freddie so completely that within months they're talking marriage. The gangster's ruthless desire to advance his own interests leaves no room for love — it just makes you soft — and in Freddie's romantic intoxication he sees an opportunity to make his move, winner take all. Director Paul McGuigan's love of sixties-era gangster movie iconography — the sharp clothes, cool music, plush clubs with gilt-patterned wallpaper and flashy filmmaking, flush with fractured reflections and split-screen images — is evident, and his loving recreation of the short-lived style is a fine tribute to its potency. The story is brutally reductive, like a slow-motion dog fight: all rising hackles, bared teeth and bloody corpses hauled out of the ring with monotonous regularity. The movie's captivating details are all in the performances, from Foreman's barking-mad Taylor to Thewlis's smoothly sinister Freddie and Bettany/McDowell's hard-eyed gangster, an amoral bottom-feeder with an expedient streak of sadism. Though McDowell is the nominal headliner, the gangster is really Bettany's character, and he banishes all traces of the geniality that distinguishes his other performances in favor of a bone-chilling remoteness. leave a comment --Maitland McDonagh
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