johnklem Review of Gangster No. 1

Gangster No. 1 (2000)

Fundamentally great film just avoids being fatally sabotaged by casting anomalies

[7/10 · 30 January 2015]

I suspect there's a very interesting backstory to the making of Gangster No. 1. Consider the casting. The main body of the film is raised to almost mythical status by the pairing of David Thewlis and Paul Bettany. Neither has given a better performance and the chemistry is to die for. Think "Single White Female" relocated to 1960s London gangsters. The movie begins in the more or less present, then goes back to the 60s before ending back where we started. Everything in that 60s segment is perfect. It's not only the leads. Every character is on the money. It's rarely that everything comes together in this way but here it does. Ageing actors by thirty years within one movie offers a real challenge to the filmmaker but here the ageing is spot on, utterly credible. Which makes the substitution of Paul Bettany with Malcom McDowell for the present-day scenes incomprehensible. It simply doesn't work. But it gets worse. McDowell's a terrific actor but here it's as though nobody showed him Bettany's footage. He's playing a completely different character. Voice, accent, mannerisms, movement, walk. They're all different to Bettany's and it almost destroys the film. That it doesn't, that Gangster No. 1 is still one of the finest gangster films you'll see, is the tragedy here. Forget "one of the...". It could have been Oscar winningly, eat your heart out Francis great. And then there's the script. I have a copy of a play, by the same name and clearly from the same source but the writers' names appear nowhere in the movie credits. As I said at the beginning of this review, an interesting backstory. It's a shame that the film and we the audience paid the price.