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British Gangster Cinema

Gangster Cinema, British Style: The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989)

By Scott Adlerberg

June 27, 2014

The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover is not the first film you're likely to come up with when thinking about British gangster movies. Filmmaker Peter Greenaway, who began his artistic endeavors as a painter, has made a name for himself as a creator of provocative and sometimes experimental works of greater or…

Gangster Cinema, British Style: The Squeeze (1977), Starring Stacey Keach, Carol White, and David Hemmings

By Scott Adlerberg

February 23, 2014

Between 1971, the year Get Carter was released, and 1980, when The Long Good Friday came out, the British made no great gangster films. If truth be told, no British crime films of any kind from this period can be called masterpieces. But during that decade, there were a few imperfect gems produced – films…

Gangster Cinema, British Style: Face (1997)

By Scott Adlerberg

December 20, 2013

If The Long Good Friday (1980) is the British crime film that captures the entrepreneurial spirit percolating in Britain just before Margaret Thatcher's ascension to Prime Minister in 1979, a harbinger of the aggressive free market days to come, then director Antonia Bird's Face serves as the bookend to the Thatcherite era. Shot in 1996…

The Hit (1984) directedd by Stephen Frears, starring Terence Stamp, John Hurt, and Tim Roth

Gangster Cinema, British Style: The Hit (1984), Starring Terence Stamp, John Hurt, and Tim Roth

By Scott Adlerberg

November 1, 2013

To grass, in British underworld parlance, means to inform on others to the police. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it derives from the word “grasshopper,” Cockney rhyming slang for copper.  The term has been around in Britain awhile, since the 1930's. In the 1970's, British journalists invented a new word, “supergrass,” to label an…

Never Let Go

Gangster Cinema, British Style: Never Let Go (1960) With Peter Sellers and Richard Todd

By Scott Adlerberg

September 15, 2013

Even a short list of the comic portraits created onscreen by Peter Sellers is impressive: Inspector Clouseau in the Pink Panther films, President Merkin Muffley and the mad Doctor Strangelove in the film Doctor Strangelove, Chauncey Gardner in Being There. No one who thinks of Peter Sellers the actor doesn't think of comedy. And yet…

Us Movie Poster for Performance (1970)

Gangster Cinema, British Style: Performance (1970) with Mick Jagger and James Fox

By Scott Adlerberg

July 27, 2013

A tagline for Performance, released in 1970, described the movie this way: “This film is about madness. And sanity. Fantasy. And reality. Death. And life. Vice. And versa.” It's a tagline of great accuracy. Few films have focused so obsessively on the idea of fusion.  And no gangster film ever made unfolds quite like Performance…

Gangster Cinema, British Style: The Long Good Friday

By Scott Adlerberg

May 24, 2013

The Americans invented the gangster film, but British film studios have been turning out their contributions to the genre since the 1940s. From the 1947 adaptation of Graham Greene’s novel Brighton Rock through the iconic 1971 Michael Caine vehicle Get Carter to the Guy Ritchie movies and Layer Cake, the Brits have produced gangster pictures…

Sexy Beast (2000)

Sexy Beast is More Than a Gangster Film

By Dennis Tafoya

October 24, 2012

The movie opens on an English gangster at his ease: Ray Winstone lays prone by his pool, baking in the Spanish sun. This is Gal, out of prison and enjoying the good life at his hillside villa with his ex-porn star girlfriend Deedee and best friend Aitch, icing down his steaming body and enjoying an…

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