Martin Scorsese's new film "Gangs of New York"

The film is in somewhat of a limited release status not quite as hard to find as "Chicago."

I echo the welcome to Larry! Welcome to A2K!

I have hesitated about posting this here, but have decided to go ahead. I don't have a link, so i'll have to paste this in it's entirety. This was sent me by a friend in England, an old time Abuzzard whom i know well enough to know that he is not just trying to pick with me because i'm of Irish descent. I also know enough of the history of the period in discussion to know that the history cited by the author rings true. The author does show a pro-protestant, pro-British sentiment here, and only briefly mentions the contributions of Irish catholics in the American Civil War. Nonetheless, this reads to me as a valid criticism. To supply the deficit of this article, tens of thousands of Irish catholics served in Federal armies, and kept faith with their new nation, even though that nation discriminated against them hardly less than against the black man. The Irish Brigade, an almost all-catholic, all-Irish immigrant brigade of New York US Volunteer regiments, originally formed with nearly 7,000 rank and file and officers, had just barely more than 600 survivors in the ranks when they arrived at Gettysburg, knelt in the woods to hear mass, and marched off to their destruction. I'm of Irish descent, so let not anyone here say that this is just a slur against the Irish--i know too much history to deny what is written in this article (and i've not seen the film):

AT LEAST THEY BUTCHER THEIR OWN HISTORY AS WELL!

Scorsese's film portrays racist mass murderers as victims

By Jonathan Foreman

(Filed: 15/01/2003)

Martin Scorsese is rightly the most lauded living American film-maker - a beacon of integrity as well as a brilliant talent. But his bloody, visually gorgeous new epic, Gangs of New York, set in Civil War-era Manhattan, distorts history at least as egregiously as The Patriot, Braveheart or the recent remake of The Four Feathers. In its confused way, it puts even the revisionism of Oliver Stone to shame. The film works so hard to make mid-19th-century Irish-American street gang members into politically correct modern heroes (and to fit them into Scorsese's view of American history as one long ethnic rumble) that it radically distorts a great and terrible historical episode. It treats the founding Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture of America with an ignorant contempt - where it doesn't cleanse it from history altogether. Generally speaking, Hollywood sees that culture not as the root of treasured democratic freedoms, but as a fount of snobbery and dreary conformism. The paradoxical result of this Hollywood faux-Leftism is that the movie ends up casually glossing over the suffering of black Americans. Gangs begins with a brutal battle in 1846 between two armies - "natives" (presumably Protestant) and immigrant Irish Catholics - for the control of the lawless Five Points area of Lower Manhattan. The leader of the Irish (Liam Neeson) is slain before the eyes of his five-year-old son, by the Natives' leader, "Bill the Butcher" (a superb Daniel Day-Lewis). The son grows up to be Leonardo DiCaprio, a tough youth who comes back to the neighbourhood 16 years later determined to avenge his father's death. By 1862, Bill the Butcher has now incorporated many of the Irish thugs - including DiCaprio - into his own criminal organisation. Eventually he comes to see the boy almost as the son he never had. When the time comes for the two of them to square off, with DiCaprio in charge of the reborn "Dead Rabbits" gang, the Civil War is casting its shadow over the city with the 1863 Draft Riots. These began with assaults on police by Irish immigrants enraged by Lincoln's conscription order on July 11, 1863. Very quickly, they turned into a monstrous pogrom, with a 50,000-strong mob murdering and mutilating every black they could find. The Coloured Orphans' Asylum was set on fire, followed by several black churches and the Anglican mission in Five Points. The city's small German Jewish population was also attacked. Panicked blacks fled to the safety of British and French vessels at anchor in the East and Hudson rivers. Many drowned. Those who were caught were often tortured and castrated before they were killed. In the film, you don't see any of this. Instead, a voice-over quoting from telegraph reports briefly mentions some of the mob's racist violence. What you do see is the suppression of the riot: blue-clad troops massacring crudely armed civilians of all ages and both sexes. The rioters stand almost impassive, and are cut down by gunfire and mortar shells lobbed from warships in the harbour (a bombardment wholly invented by the film-makers). The film's narrator claims - and it's a flat-out lie - that the mob was a multi-ethnic uprising of the city's poor, that Germans and Poles joined with the Irish immigrants against New York's epicene patricians and an unjust conscription policy that allowed the wealthy to buy their way out of military service for $300. In fact the city's 120,000 German immigrants, many of them Catholics, took no part in the riots, there were almost no Poles living in the city and the rioters were almost entirely Irish. They were furious with the city's blacks because the city's free Negroes were often skilled artisans, economically and socially a rung or two above the newly arrived Irish, many of whom didn't speak English. Yet the film consistently portrays the "nativist" Yankees, led by Daniel Day-Lewis's Bill the Butcher, as racists and the Irish underclass criminals, led by Leonardo DiCaprio, as multiculturalists avant la lettre. The film's misrepresentation of the "natives" begins early on. While the film's Irish Catholics have a vibrant, energetic culture, the "native" Americans merely have prejudice. And you would never know that New York's population included substantial numbers of Orange Ulstermen - a hundred people were killed in New York Orange-Green rioting as late as the riot of July 12, 1871. Nor would you know from Scorsese's depiction that Yankees - Northern Americans of English, Scottish, Welsh and Dutch extraction - increasingly thought that they were fighting the Civil War to abolish slavery. In the words of their favourite battle hymn, Jesus died to make men holy, and they would die to make men free. The ending of slavery isn't on Scorsese's map, because its inclusion would be too difficult: it would require honesty and courage to reveal that his heroes - the Celtic predecessors of today's beloved mafia - were on the wrong side of the most significant moral and political struggle in America's history. Nor would you know that many Irish volunteers fought with spectacular bravery on behalf of the union. Instead, everyone villainous in Gangs of New York is either a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant or an Irish Catholic who has sold out to WASPs. There's something bizarre about glorifying a subculture that fought to undermine Lincoln's war to preserve the union and end slavery. Scorsese is treating racist mass murderers as heroes and victims. Yes, the Irish were cruelly abused in their adopted country. But it's a strange modern fetish that assumes that victims cannot also be victimisers. If, as the ad copy goes, "America was born in the streets", it was not in the squalid, savage turf struggles of the Five Points, but in the streets of Boston and Lexington in 1776 - where the people traduced here as having no identity or qualities outside their xenophobia, fought for the liberties that all modern Americans take for granted.

Jonathan Foreman is film critic of the New York Post

It's hard to believe, but I think maybe the Post's film critic saw an edited version of the movie. Because it's very obvious, at the end of the film, that the draft rioters were being brutal to African Americans. Isn't a lynching brutal enough? That was in the film.

The message at the end of the film (IMHO) is that the various gangs we'd been following throughout had become irrelevant in light of the populist uprising of the draft riots. Were the rioters racist? No doubt, as was shown in the film. Life rarely divides into neat divisions of good vs. evil, and that's not how Scorsese presents it.

I did mention that i'd not seen the film, but i thought it germaine, nevertheless, to post that article. If it were, however, assured that everyone seeing the film knew sufficient about the history of the Irish in America, i might not care. A gentleman with whom i once disagreed on the topic of the history of Amerindians very smugly assured me that he knew whereof he spoke, as he had seen Dances With Wolves more than once. I fear that for many, the history they get is the history Hollywood sells them. As an American of Irish descent, it rather bothers me that so many in this country will now knowingly recount the rise of the Irish from murderous street gangs in the Five Points--without a clue as to the isolated, irrelevant nature of the life of that criminal area.

By the by, for anyone interested in actually reading about the Five Points, and crime in American history, there is an exhaustive, anecdotal history entitled Bloodletters and Badmen, by Jay Robert Nash. First published in 1973 (i believe), as a slim hardbound book, it has now grown to a fat paperback, with the revised title: Bloodletters and badmen : a narrative encyclopedia of American criminals from the Pilgrims to the present. Quite an interesting read. For however much Scorcese might present life as not entirely black and white, if he focuses on criminal gangs in the Five Points, he is dealing with a small, unrepresentative group of people, who briefly lead vicious and meaningless lives in our nation's history. The reviewer is justified in the criticism in the same way that people are justified in criticizing Oliver Stone--far too many people are mislead by demagogic movie makers, just as they were by demogogic public speakers in an earlier age. We should always decry such messages, and, occassionally, the bringer of the message.

We have a Five Points near us in Huntington Beach and about the only fight I've seen there was over a candleholder at Pier One.

You have to go to that big fairly new mall at Newport Beach to see real fights. They occasionally break out at that Mexican restaurant the name of which I no longer recall. People actually argue over the two-for-a-dollar tacos during happy hour.

Now, if them there tacos is real good, that might could justify fisticuffs . . .

They ain't overly large, Setanta, but you slap enough salsa caliente picante on them and they go real well with a cold Corona.

Also, of course, the gustatory standards decrease in inverse proportion to the consumption of cold Coronas . . .

Setanta, perhaps you should see the film before deciding it misrepresents the history of the period. I have a friend, who also hasn't seen the film, who criticized it for not depicting the main characters with bad teeth.

It's a movie. Based on real events, but not a documentary. I'm not sure why this film has inspired so much picky criticism--especially from those who haven't seen it! Perhaps this is some kind of backhanded tribute to Scorsese...

In fact, i mentioned at the beginning that i'd not seen the movie, but rather was reacting to the critique of it which i had cited, along with the author's name--so if you wish to pick nits, i suggest you contact that individual. I am concerned that such a thing would happen, however, as i am of Irish descent, and no more want to see criminals glorified, than to see innocent, civil immigrants trashed. You need to lighten up your tone, Boss, i've done you no harm, and done no disservice in bringing this to the attention of those who read this thread.



As a matter of fact, as recently as the late 1970's, when last i was in Ireland, it was so common to see the citizens of that nation with bad teeth, that one soon ceased to notice it. I think it a bit much to expect motion picture producers and directors to buck the system that much, however--after all, they rely on masculine and feminine beauty to sell the pictures.

I've had people grow vehemently angry with me because i contradicted their views of history and society, which had been gleaned from the silver screen, as they freely admitted themselves. That was why i posted what i did, because those who post here are sufficiently intelligent to recognize such distortions, if provided the information upon which to make the judgment. All that taken aside, i can tell you that i know sufficient about the Five Points neighborhood in New York in the period concerned to state without equivocation that anyone who glamorizes any of the denizens of that neighborhood is playing fast and loose with the truth.

Hollywood can't change the results of history but the means to the end is often altered and exagerrated for aesthetic punch. The fate of Spartacus is quite different from the film version which was the only studio film Kubrick was ever involved in -- his first and his last involvment with the studios. Scorcese has had his confrontations with studio bosses and won on his laurels. He wanted to sell this film to the public and enlarging the scope, changing seasons of the centerpiece conflict, and other alterations I would say has to be in the eyes of the beholder. As far as history, it has to be looked upon as whether it ultimately changed the results of history. Setanta's historian says it does but I reserve the right to see the film. I have a feeling he received the Golden Globe, not quite as tightly knit with the Hollywood machine as Oscar, for his career as much this film. Rob Murrow's direction of "Chicago" is nothing short of miraculous -- it has the heart of a Broadway musical and the depth of good cinema.

Re bad teeth: Agreed, Setanta. I asked the friend who passed on the critique of dental standards in "Gangs" if he expected the same of films set in Victorian England--or the contemporary UK for that matter.

If DiCaprio and Diaz had noticeably bad teeth, that's what we'd notice in the film. They were supposed to look scruffy but attractive. Why create a side show?

It is unfortunate that fifteen years from now, the majority of our history deficient citizenry will consider the naval bombardment of the rioters (a non event) a historical fact. I believe that is too high a price to pay for adding excitement and shock to a film.

I wouldn't object to Scorsese's historical inaccuracies nearly so much if they had freed him to make a lively and engrossing film...but GANGS is stolid, dull, and ultimately uninvolving. DiCaprio is much better in CATCH ME IF YOU CAN, where he gets to be sly and sexy, instead of sleepwalking as he does in GANGS. Day Lewis is too much of a good thing as Bill the Butcher--he dominates the movie because he's the only character with a heartbeat. All the production values $110 million could buy can't salvage a flat, unengaging script which climaxes in the worst ending a historical epic ever had--Scorsese's abysmally inept staging of the draft riots. You walk out of GANGS OF NEW YORK stupefied that nearly three hours of film has climaxed with absolutely zero emotional payoff.

I take it you weren't impressed, Larry. It was hard to tell from the tone of your post...

Ahhhh, dry sarcasm . . . best served that way, like a martini . . .

Ah, yes, one of my favorite stimulants!

I, for one, loved the movie, and I haven't even seen it yet.

(What was that about dry Saracens, Setanta?)