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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
