Example #7 -- The Guardian

The Guardian is interesting because it offers commentaries from a non-US perspective. This piece on British gangster films reveal how different the genre is in Great Britain. I've highlighted some interesting bits and added some parenthetical comments:

Guardian Unlimited: Arts blog - film

If only... British gangster movies would stop living off former glories

Sexy Beast: One of a handful of memorable gangsta movies since Get Carter and Performance. Photograph: Kobal Collection

Oh, for goodness sake, I thought we'd recovered from this infantile British gangster boom. (Aren't we talking about a cycle of films?) I thought Guy Ritchie and his acolytes and imitators had been shamed back into their lairs after the Cool Britannia-era revival of the form, which produced a glut of duff throwbacks to Get Carter and Performance and The Sweeney, but only a handful of memorable new movies (among which I would count Sexy Beast, Gangster No 1, The Limey, three-quarters of Face, much of I'll Sleep When I'm Dead, and the TV adaptation of Jake Arnott's The Long Firm).

The remainder failed to understand that a gangster movie cannot live by Cecil Gee suits and gor-blimey retro-argot alone. (But what if they are postmodern gangster films -- and doesn't that fit with Altman's adjective theory? Maybe these are really PM films, structured over a gangster film the same way Pursued is a noir Western) The neo-gangster boomlet ran parallel to the sad mid-90s publishing phenomenon wherein old lags with lily-white prison-tans sought to supplement their state pensions with a succession of sub-literate true crime memoirs, many of which lay dead on the page because said lags had already polished their anecdotes to death before sitting down with their ghostwriters. ...

But no, here comes The Bank Job, another by-the-numbers blag'n'slag opera (Wow, what a great genre slang term) , yet again starring dim-bulb Ritchie-discovery Jason Statham. ...

Still, there is some life left in the genre, no matter that it's been trampled flat by idiots and frauds. So might I suggest an adaptation of the best of these memoirs, The Autobiography of A Thief by Great Train Robber Bruce Reynolds? If the train robbery were put in the full context of Reynolds' life of crime (and punishment), I think a great movie, or better yet, a great TV series, could be made from it. (This seems like a very strange turn -- would an American reviewer start hawking a different project in the middle of a piece?)

I see an epic, 30 year, four-part structure: early crimes (including the 1960 Heathrow job); the train robbery itself; five years on the run, plus 12 years in prison; then release and afterwards, with all the chronology scrambled. To enliven matters, it would be shot in ways that recall British films (and not just gangster films) of each era: black-and-white kitchen-sink realism to open with, switching to bright, swinging London colours only after success and legendary status are achieved, then a washed-out colour scheme for prison and release into Thatcher's Britain of the 1980s. I'd suggest David Morrissey for Reynolds because, in the Brian Jones movie Stoned, Morrissey's minder character was an absolute dead-ringer for Bruce. (This also sounds like a PM gangster film -- maybe with more parody than pastiche though)

And if someone else doesn't get to work on it soon, I might just do the job myself. For a nice little drink, of course.