Gangs of New York

Abstract

The director dreamed of making the movie for decades; the studio spent over $100 million on a project completed two years behind schedule; the hype machine cranked out tales of endless script rewrites and bitter power struggles among the film makers. Historians kept their fingers crossed, hoping that one of the world's premier movie auteurs would combine his artistic imagination, street savvy, and passion for history to produce that rarest of creatures: an epic drama that entertains a commercial audience while bringing history plausibly and intelligently to life.Could any film live up to these expectations? Probably not. But Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York disappoints both as drama and as historical vision, its flaws all the more glaring because of the enormous build-up. In October 2001, just a few weeks after the 9/11 catastrophe, Scorsese appeared at a special session devoted to his work-inprogress at the first ever conference on New York City history, held at the CUNY Graduate Center. Underneath the production anecdotes and the breezy banter, one sensed Scorsese's strong desire to be taken seriously by the hundreds of historians and other scholars who packed the auditorium. When the lights dimmed and he began showing a few scenes from the rough cut the audience let out a collective gasp—the sound of having its breath taken away by the movie's extraordinary look. It was hard to make much sense of these clips, but the world of New York's Five Points in the 1850s appeared so lovingly and carefully recreated that one could practically smell the offal, taste the stale beer, and feel the tense ethnic hatred hanging over the streets like the worst August humidity. The Five Points set is the real star of this movie. Shot in the sprawling Cinecitta studios in Rome, the film evidently spared no expense in recreating the dismal tenements, filthy streets, and period clothing of America's first and worst urban slum. By eschewing computer generated imagery Scorsese harks back to the old-school Hollywood tradition of directors like Cecil B. DeMille and D. W. Griffith, who placed a premium on bringing “realistic” physical spectacle to the screen.