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Great British Gangster Movies

Voley

Voley

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'The Long Good Friday' has to be the greatest, doesn't it?

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"The Mafia? I shit 'em."

Or is it 'Get Carter'?

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"You're a big man, but you're in bad shape. With me it's a full time job. Now behave yourself."

I only ask because I've just watched 'Sexy Beast' for the first time and I thought it was great; one of the best I've seen. Ben Kingsley! Christ! He was terrifying! And he played Gandhi once!

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"I'm sweating like a cunt." :D

So. What's your favourite?

Anyone that says 'Lock Stock' is a slaaaaaaaaaaag.
 
Get Carter is one of the most horrible nihilistic films I know of, so thumbs up to that.

Am I the only one who found Kingsley's character more clownish than anything else? I mean, a really dangerous clown obviously, but so far out of standard norms of behaviour that you'd have thought everyone would have gotten together and had him quietly gotten rid of a while ago.
 
Ooh, fuck yeah. 'Performance'. I forgot that one, too.

"Drugs. Liquor. Free Love".

"I like a bit of a cavort".

and numerous other Happy Mondays samples.
 
FridgeMagnet said:
Am I the only one who found Kingsley's character more clownish than anything else? I mean, a really dangerous clown obviously, but so far out of standard norms of behaviour that you'd have thought everyone would have gotten together and had him quietly gotten rid of a while ago.
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There's always a bit of that with proper film nutters, though. Look at Dennis Hopper in 'Blue Velvet' - so OTT that it's ridiculous but genuinely scary at the same time.

You'd imagine someone like Kingsley would end up being killed, though, yeah. But not until the fellas at the top had used him to put the shits up everyone first.

The fella at the top, in this case, being Ian McShane; Lovejoy. :D
 
British gangster movies are great for spotting B-list TV actors, too. The bloke that Harold Shand brutally murders with a bottle in 'Long Good Friday' is Charlie off 'Casualty'.

The amount of people off 'The Bill' that get snuffed in the first half hour is incredible sometimes.
 
Annierak said:
I thought Jagger was really good in it. Sexy too which disturbed me a bit :D
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I think he's the weakest link in Performance's cast, and it's not as if he was even having to stretch himself with the part either. :D

On the plus side, his musical contribution (Memo From Turner) is fantastic, plus I imagine that his involvement pretty much guaranteed that the film ever got made and [-eventually...] seen.
 
chooch said:
Long Good Friday soundtrack's horrible though, ain't it?
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I love it.

The Francis Monckman Orchestra. Quite how the fuck I've stored that bit of info in me head all these years, I'll never know. :D

I think it fits the film perfectly. Bad blasting cheesy music to match the horrible hair and the 70's nylon flares. Ace. :D Giorgio Moroder's hideous synth soundtrack to 'Scarface' works along the same lines.
 
Sunspots said:
I think he's the weakest link in Performance's cast, and it's not as if he was even having to stretch himself with the part either. :D

On the plus side, his musical contribution (Memo From Turner) is fantastic, plus I imagine that his involvement pretty much guaranteed that the film ever got made and [-eventually...] seen.
Click to expand...
Oh yes, he's the weakest character in it but he had presence.

What about 'The Krays'? Or was that just a Kemp too far?
 
NVP said:
There's always a bit of that with proper film nutters, though. Look at Dennis Hopper in 'Blue Velvet' - so OTT that it's ridiculous but genuinely scary at the same time.

You'd imagine someone like Kingsley would end up being killed, though, yeah. But not until the fellas at the top had used him to put the shits up everyone first.

The fella at the top, in this case, being Ian McShane; Lovejoy. :D
Click to expand...

Probably a personal thing; Hopper scared me last time I saw Blue Velvet. Perhaps also to do with the setting, in that, in Dirty Beast, a lot of the main characters are (or are meant to be) pretty hardcore, whereas BV concentrates on the innocent being introduced into the surreal world of crime etc.

N.B. do not fuck with Lovejoy he will shit you.
 
Villain (which also features Ian MacShane, in less leathery form) has Richard Burton as a Kray-alike by way of White Heat.

Sean Connery's nonce-hating copper in The Offence touches on many on the moods and tones other films mentioned in this thread feature, without being itself a 'gangster' movie.

Stanley Baker's mid/late sixties Great Train Robbery analogue, Robbery, is a bridge between earlier, gritty British crime dramas like his own The Criminal and subsequent, more self-consciously fun caper flicks like The Italian Job. That film's Charlie Croker (also of Get Carter) Michael Caine, made the journey back to the seedier seam of gangster movies in 2000's Shiner, in which he ekes out a similar - but more sympathetic - character to his turn in Mona Lisa.

Get Carter's directer Mike Hodges returned to the limelight with the noirish Croupier in 1998; he followed it up with the bleak, and more explicitly gangster-orientated I'll Sleep When I'm Dead five years later, again featuring Clive Owen as his antihero.

Finally, consider Shooters, a film by Dan Reed which originated in his desire to make a documentary about real life gangsters in Liverpool, but which instead evolved into a semi-improvised piece of fiction on the same topic, starring many of the men he had met during his research into the subject - steroidal 'door men' and the like.
 
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