GANGS OF NEW YORK

In the second year of the great civil war, when the Irish brigades marched through the streets, New york was a city full of tribes. War chiefs, rich and poor. It wasn't a city really, It was more a furnace where cities someday might be forged.
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FILM REVIEW; To Feel A City Seethe
By A. O. SCOTT



GANGS OF NEW YORK,'' Martin Scorsese's brutal, and indelible epic of 19th-century urban criminality, begins in a huge torchlighted cavern, where a group of warriors prepare for battle, arming themselves with clubs and blades and armoring themselves in motley leather and cloth. Though this is Lower Manhattan in 1846, it might as well be the Middle Ages or the time of Gilgamesh: these warlike rituals have an archaic, archetypal feeling.

And the participants are aware of this. As the members of various colorfully named Irish gangs emerge into the winter daylight of Paradise Square (a place long since given over to high-rises and resurrected here on the grounds of the vast Cinecittà studio complex in Rome), their native-born Protestant enemies greet them with an invocation of ''the ancient laws of combat.'' The ensuing melee turns the new-fallen snow pink with blood and claims the life of Priest Vallon (Liam Neeson), an Irish gang chieftain whose young son witnesses the carnage.

Sixteen years later, the boy, whose name is Amsterdam, has grown into Leonardo DiCaprio, his wide, implacable face framed by lank hair and a wispy Van Dyke. He returns from a long stint in the Hell Gate Reformatory to his old neighborhood, the Five Points, and finds it ruled by his father's killer, Bill Cutting (Daniel Day-Lewis), known as the Butcher, a swaggering monster who has turned the anniversary of Priest's death into a local holiday.

Like a figure out of Jacobean theater or a Dumas novel, Amsterdam is consumed by the need for revenge. With the help of a boyhood friend (Henry Thomas), he infiltrates the Butcher's inner circle, becoming a surrogate son to the man who assassinated his father and who now, in accordance with those ancient laws, venerates Priest's memory.

The New York evoked in Amsterdam's voice-over is ''a city full of tribes and war chiefs,'' whose streets are far meaner than any Mr. Scorsese has contemplated before. The Butcher has formed an alliance of convenience with Boss Tweed (Jim Broadbent), the kingpin of Tammany Hall, and together they administer an empire of graft, extortion and larceny that would put any 20th-century movie gangster or political boss to shame. Rival fire companies turn burning buildings into sites of rioting and plunder; crowds gather to witness hangings, bare-knuckled boxing contests and displays of knife throwing.

As new immigrants, from Ireland and elsewhere, pour off the ships in New York harbor, they are mustered into Tweed's Democratic Party and then, since they lack the $300 necessary to buy their way out, into the Union Army. Occasionally a detachment of reform-minded swells will tour the Points, availing themselves of the perennial privileges of squeamish titillation and easy moral superiority. This anarchic inferno is, in Amsterdam's words, not so much a city as ''a cauldron in which a great city might be forged.''

And in recreating it, Mr. Scorsese has made a near-great movie. His interest in violence, both random and organized, is matched by his love of street-level spectacle. His Old New York is a gaudy multiethnic carnival of misrule, music and impromptu theater, a Breughel painting come to life. Though the details of this lawless, teeming, vibrant milieu may be unfamiliar, we nonetheless instinctively recognize it, from the 19th-century novels of Dickens and Zola, from samurai movies and American westerns and from some of this director's previous films.

Most notably in ''Mean Streets, ''Goodfellas,'' ''The Age of Innocence'' and ''Casino,'' Mr. Scorsese has functioned as a kind of romantic visual anthropologist, fascinated by tribal lore and language, by half-acknowledged codes of honor and retribution and by the boundaries between loyalty and vengeance, between courtesy and violence, that underlie a given social order.

At 2 hours 45 minutes, the film, deftly edited by Mr. Scorsese's frequent collaborator Thelma Schoonmaker, moves swiftly and elegantly. It is never dull, but I must confess that I wish it were longer,

IT WAS NEVER DULL BUT I MUST CONFESS I WISH IT WERE LONGER. WHY NOT JUST WISH IT WERE LONGER. OF COURSE IT WAS NEVER DULL. IT'S A FUCKING MASTERPIECE. AND CLEAR, NOBODY MUMBLES, THE STORY IS NEVER CONFUSED, ACTORS DON'T LOOK LIKE EACH OTHER. THIS WHOLE REVIEW IS TOO LONG. THE MOVIE WAS THIRTY YEARS IN THE MAKING. FASCINATING CAST. AMAZING HISTORIC CAMEOS, BOSS TWEED, HORACE GREELY. CAN'T WISH FOR A BETTER FILM.



so that the lives of the protagonists, rather than standing out in relief against a historical background, were more fully embedded within it.

SO IT WAS LIKE, A REALLY GOOD MOVIE. COULD BEEN A LOT LONGER. COULA BEEN LIKE THE SOPRANOS, `150 HOURS, BUT THAT WOULD NEVER OCCUR TO A REVIEWER FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES, WHERE IMAGINAGINATION IS USELESS. COULDA BEEN IN THREE D, IN CINERAMA TOO. BUT COULDN'T HAVE BEEN BETTER. IT IS A MASTERPIECE. TOO BA DIF YOU MISSED IT AT THE THEATER. CAUSE IN THE U.S. OF A, WE DON'T DO RERUNS. I MUST CONFESS. WHO SAYS I MUST CONFESS.




''Gangs of New York'' is an important film as well as an entertaining one. With this project, Mr. Scorsese has made his passionate ethnographic sensibility the vehicle of an especially grand ambition. He wants not only to reconstruct the details of life in a distant era but to construct, from the ground up, a narrative of historical change, to explain how we -- New Yorkers, Americans, modern folk who disdain hand-to-hand bloodletting and overt displays of corruption -- got from there to here, how the ancient laws gave way to modern ones.


The director's great accomplishment, the result of three decades of mulling and research inspired by Herbert Asbury's ''Gangs of New York'' -- a 1928 book nearly as legendary as the world it illuminates -- has been to bring to life not only the texture of the past but its force and velocity as well. For all its meticulously imagined costumes and sets (for which the production designer, Dante Ferretti, surely deserves an Oscar), this is no costume drama.

It is informed not by the polite antiquarianism of Merchant and Ivory but by the political ardor of someone like Luchino Visconti, one of Mr. Scorsese's heroes. ''Senso,'' Visconti's lavish 1953 melodrama set during the Italian Risorgimento (and his first color film), is one of the touchstones of ''My Voyage to Italy,'' Mr. Scorsese's fascinating, quasi-autobiographical documentary on postwar Italian cinema.

Though ''Gangs of New York'' throws in its lot with the rabble rather than the aristocracy, it shares with ''Senso'' (and also with ''The Leopard,'' Visconti's 1965 masterpiece) a feeling that the past, so full of ambiguity and complexity, of barbarism and nobility, continues to send its aftershocks into the present. It shows us a world on the brink of vanishing and manages to mourn that world without doubting the inevitability or the justice of its fate.

''America was born in the streets,'' the posters for ''Gangs'' proclaim. Later, Amsterdam Vallon, in the aftermath of the draft riots, muses that ''our great city was born in blood and tribulation.'' Nobody as steeped in film history as Mr. Scorsese could offer such a metaphor without conjuring the memory of D. W. Griffith's ''Birth of a Nation,'' and Griffith, along with John Ford and others, is one of the targets of Mr. Scorsese's revisionism.

In Griffith's film, adapted from ''The Clansman,'' a best-selling novel by Thomas Dixon, the American republic was reborn after Reconstruction, when the native-born whites of the North and South overcame their sectional differences in the name of racial supremacy. Ford's myth of American origins -- which involved the subjugation of the frontier and the equivocal replacement of antique honor by modern justice -- also typically took place after the Civil War.

In ''Gangs,'' the pivotal event in our history is the riot that convulsed New York in July of 1863. While this emphasis places the immigrant urban working class at the center of the American story -- a fairly radical notion in itself -- the film hardly sentimentalizes the insurrection, which was both a revolt against local and federal authority and a vicious massacre of the black citizens of New York.

The rioters are seen as exploited, oppressed and destined to be cannon fodder in a war they barely understand, but they are far from heroic, and the violence of the riots makes the film's opening gang battle seem quaint and decorous. What we are witnessing is the eclipse of warlordism and the catastrophic birth of a modern society. Like the old order, the new one is riven by class resentment, racism and political hypocrisy, attributes that change their form at every stage of history but that seem to be as embedded in human nature as the capacity for decency, solidarity and courage.

This is historical filmmaking without the balm of right-thinking ideology, either liberal or conservative. Mr. Scorsese's bravery and integrity in advancing this vision can hardly be underestimated.

This movie was a long time in the making, but its life has barely begun. Now that the industry gossip about it has subsided, let us hope that a more substantial discussion can start. People who care about American history, professionally and otherwise, will no doubt weigh in on the accuracy of its particulars and the validity of its interpretation; they will also, I hope, revisit some of their own suppositions in light of its unsparing and uncompromised imagining of the past. I said earlier that ''Gangs of New York'' is a great movie.

CAN I MENTION THAT NOBODY GIVES A SHIT ABOUT ACCURACY OR POINT OF VIEW. NOBODY. IT'S A WORK OF LITERATURE, OF FICTION, OF IMAGINATION. SHUT THE FUCK UP. I MEAN THAT. NEVER TALK LIKE A SHMUCK! OR A GAY,.


Now that the industry gossip about it has subsided, let us hope that a more substantial discussion can start. you silly goose.

''Gangs of New York'' is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). The pervasiveness of its violence makes you realize how much New York has changed in a century and a half. On the other hand,the pervasiveness of its violence may lead you to think that it has barely changed at all. WHAT A TOTAL IDIOT. barely changed at all. WHY DOES THIS GUY HAVE TO SAY TOTALLY DUMB AND STUPID THINGS, IN THE NEW YORK TIMES. IT IS STUPIDL ON THE OTHER HAND NEW YORK HAS BARELY CHANGED AT ALL. I MEAN, THAT SHOWS WHAT A TOTAL LACK OF IMAGINATION THIS GUY SUFFERS FROM.

GANGS OF NEW YORK

Directed by Martin Scorsese
WITH: Leonardo DiCaprio (Amsterdam Vallon), Daniel Day-Lewis (Bill the Butcher), Cameron Diaz (Jenny Everdeane), Liam Neeson (Priest Vallon), Jim Broadbent (Boss Tweed), John C. Reilly (Happy Jack), Henry Thomas (Johnny) and Brendan Gleeson (Monk McGinn).


Gangs of New York
By Geoffrey C. Ward



PARADISE ALLEY

THE NEW YORK DRAFT RIOTS.

By Kevin Baker.

676 pp. New York:

HarperCollins Publishers. $26.95.

Until September 2001, three summer days in 1863 were the most frightening in the history of New York City. From Monday, July 13, through Wednesday, July 17, mobs held much of Manhattan. The rioters were working class, overwhelmingly Irish Catholic and filled with smoldering resentments -- at the Yankee Protestants who exploited and demeaned them, at the squalor in which they were forced to live, at inflationary prices and lockouts and strikebreaking. But the final spark was provided by the new National Conscription Act, which made virtually all able-bodied men eligible for the draft but allowed the well-to-do to escape service in the Union Army by paying a $300 fee. As many of the Irish saw it, poor white workingmen like themselves were being forced to fight for the freedom of blacks, who would then come north and take their jobs. They burned federal property and attacked Republican newspaper offices, looted stores and wrecked private homes, killed policemen and soldiers who tried to stop them and beat or butchered any African-American men, women or children who happened to cross their path. A puzzled foreign visitor asked a bystander why blacks were the special targets of their anger. ''Oh, sir,'' the man replied, ''they hate them here'' because ''they are the innocent cause of all these troubles.''

The New York draft riots remain the worst civil disturbance in American history: according to the historian Adrian Cook, 119 people are known to have been killed, mostly rioters or onlookers who got too close when federal troops, brought back from the battlefield to restore order, started shooting.

Those three chaotic days provide the backdrop for Kevin Baker's extraordinary new novel, ''Paradise Alley.'' Baker is simultaneously a richly imaginative fiction writer steeped in historical fact and a meticulous historian who cheerfully alters actual events whenever it serves the intricate, many-sided stories he likes to spin. As the chief historical researcher for Harold Evans, Baker ferreted out a lot of the quirky details that helped fill Evans's best-selling ''American Century'' with so many unexpected pleasures. ''In the News,'' Baker's column in American Heritage magazine, offers readers a bimonthly dose of historical context for current events, shrewdly distinguishing those items for which the past really is prologue from those for which a knowledge of history isn't much help. In his 1999 novel, ''Dreamland,'' he managed both to paint a wholly plausible portrait of immigrant New York around 1910 and to tell a gritty, exuberant tale that blended historic personages (including Sigmund Freud) and a large fictional cast, with two great conflagrations: the blaze that destroyed the Dreamland Amusement Park at Coney Island and the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, which helped to catalyze the American labor movement. The result was irresistible.

''Paradise Alley'' is just as successful -- and no less ambitious. In ''Dreamland,'' the immigrant protagonists were Jewish and eastern European. In ''Paradise Alley,'' they are Roman Catholic and Irish. But the misery of their surroundings remains the same: they live in the notorious Fourth Ward, where feral pigs snuffle through gutters heaped with filth, a single spigot serves three blocks and people live more densely packed -- 290,000 to the square mile -- than in any other neighborhood on earth. They battle against the same odds, too, and struggle with the same vexing riddle: when does an immigrant become an American?

Like a skilled ringmaster, Baker sets seven major characters in motion on the morning of July 13. Most of them occupy derelict houses along the short, fetid block off Cherry Street that gives the book its title. The mob is still just background noise then. ''Something both more and less,'' a member of Baker's cast notes, ''than the daily going to work, the bawdy, boisterous awakening of the City that she liked to listen to every morning from her doorstep before joining it herself.'' But as the story sweeps along -- Baker is a master of momentum -- the distant thunder grows closer and closer until its roar drowns out everything else, a lethal threat to all the people he has made us care about.

Ruth Dove is an Irish-born ragpicker: married to a runaway slave from South Carolina named Billy Dove, she lives in fear of her former lover, Johnny Dolan -- Dangerous Johnny Dolan -- a sometime bare-knuckle boxer whom the horrors of the potato famine have turned into a murderous sociopath. As the book begins, Ruth learns that after a 14-year forced exile she helped arrange, he has returned to New York bent on revenge. Deirdre Dolan O'Kane, the killer's older sister, is as different from him as she can possibly make herself: a proud, pious ex-domestic, intent on working her way out of poverty, she wants her family to ''live like Americans,'' and has transformed her husband, Tom, from a member of a notorious riverfront gang called the Break O'Day Boys into a sober and reliable wage earner. Now she is frightened that by talking him into volunteering to serve in the celebrated Irish Brigade, the Fighting 69th, she has sent him to his death. Maddy Boyle is a teenage prostitute, kept by the book's only important Protestant character, a self-confessed hack named Herbert Willis Robinson. He works for Horace Greeley's New York Tribune and is a keen observer of everything except himself; his reluctance to take his mistress into his home in the guarded sanctuary of Gramercy Park leaves her vulnerable to the mob as it roars into Paradise Alley in search of victims.

Without ever slowing his novel's pace or letting us lose sight of any of his characters, the author takes the reader on a careering, kaleidoscopic tour of their world. The timorous might think twice before embarking. Baker's itinerary encompasses ravaged Ireland and the carnage at Fredericksburg, as well as New York's lower depths. He takes his readers to a bull-baiting pit, walks them past slaughterhouses and through a Manhattan sewer filled with scuttling rats. And we visit places most New Yorkers know nothing about: Seneca Village, the black squatters' settlement that stood in the center of what is now Central Park till 19th-century gentrification moved uptown and wiped it out; a waterfront dive where, for a nickel, thirsty patrons are welcome to as much rotgut whiskey as they can suck through a rubber hose in 30 seconds; and a Bowery saloon that displays on its bar a jar of pickled ears, bitten off misbehaving customers by the female proprietor.

Baker's story is so rich in color and drama that here and there some readers may find their credulity strained. But a random check of several of the sources he obligingly provides shows that while he has often changed names and altered locations to suit the story, many of those scenes that seem least plausible turn out to be the most faithful to the recorded facts: a canny black man did deflect a murderous mob by putting on an impromptu minstrel show; when rioters shouting ''Burn the niggers' nest!'' set fire to the Colored Orphan Asylum on Fifth Avenue, a block north of where the Public Library now stands, it really was a heroic Irish boy who emerged from nowhere to lead the 237 terrified children who lived there to safety in a precinct house; and a family's hairsbreadth escape over the rooftops of burning houses that at first seems to have been snipped from an old-fashioned Saturday afternoon serial turns out to have happened almost precisely as Baker describes it.

As a convincing portrayal of how things were in our city that terrible summer and as a compelling fictional vision of how things might have been, as well, ''Paradise Alley'' is twice a triumph.




Do you long for the good old days when New York newspapers and post cards were a penny, seltzer was two cents, when you could smoke in restaurants and be free from the harassments of police who ticket you for a blown-out back light on your twelve- year-old VW? Would you want to live in Manhattan when monthly rents were in two figures, being at the crossroads of the nation's culture without maxing out on your MasterCard? Then set your time machine back to when different ethnic groups lived together harmoniously, when you could walk the streets at night while keeping your head on your shoulders, and where you could breathe pure air and glorious sunshine free from the pollutants of automobiles, planes and cell phone indulgences. Oops...you made a mistake. You went back to the 1860's only to find yourself in a city enmeshed in such violence and corruption that today's Manhattan looks remarkably like Plato's Republic. To Trent Lott's dismay, slavery is breathing its last gasp, but insidious forces of class and culture are ripping the core from the Big Apple.


What would you find in those glorious days of yesteryear? According to Martin Scorsese, a devotee of films of intelligence, visual beauty, verbal style and feverish imagination, you'd witness things that teacher never told you about our Great Nation, but then again the revisionists who diss Abraham Lincoln for not really caring whether slavery existed or not and downgrade Columbus for not really discovering America and for bringing nothing but disease and death to the natives, would not be at all surprised.

If you lived in the middle of the 19th century in the area now inhabited by Manhattan's Federal Courthouse just blocks northeast of City Hall, you'd in the center of a storm. This was the neighborhood that would make Hell's Kitchen, the scene for "West Side Story," look like Dorothy's Kansas. At the crossroads of five large avenues centered on Paradise Road was the a section called Five Points where sordid things were going down. Boss Tweed ruled Tammany Hall, responsible for getting votes for his party especially from the immigrants who lurched forth from boats, eager to avoid the famine and general poverty of Ireland. As Tweed (Jim Broadbent) states in the film, it's not the ballots the win elections: it's the counters. Tweed was not at all disturbed to have his henchmen drag workers away from whatever activity they considered more important. Women of the night worked the 'hood, some moonlighting as pickpockets such as the prettiest redhead in the city, Jenny Everdeane (Cameron Diaz) who might have introduced current pliers of the trade with the method often used, bump and pick. (When Jenny would accidentally trip over you, you mind was not on your wallet for the moment.)

Cops were corrupt, of course, the neighborhood covered by Happy Jack (John C. Reilly). The film's center, however, is the conflicted relationship between Bill the Butcher (Daniel Day-Lewis performing in the role of the meat-cutter who actually existed at the time), and a second-generation Irish-American who had been in the country all his life, Amsterdam Vallon (Leonardo DiCaprio). Amsterdam at the age of about six witnesses a small war in 1846 between the so-called Nativists who believe themselves to be the True Americans and were led by Bill the Butcher, and the newer settlers, the Irish, led by Amsterdam's dad, Priest Vallon (Liam Neeson). Weapons, shown to us in the audience close up, include axes, sticks, knives and bricks, and it is here that the forces believing that too much violence in the movies spills over into audience action would be tempted to leave the theater as the cobblestone streets are painted blood-red.

When Scorsese moves forward by sixteen years to 1863-3, the Civil War is in progress, men are being drafted although the rich fellows who had $300 could buy their way out, and Amsterdam strangely becomes a best buddy of Bill presumably because as an orphan Amsterdam looks to his dad's killer as a powerful father figure while for his part the childless Bill "adopts" the young man not knowing his real identity. The nucleus of the drama is the ironic relationship between the two courageous men, Bill teaching Amsterdam how to kill by having him practice on a pig (whose organs are most similar to those of human beings). Ultimately Amsterdam's identity becomes known, leading to a final face-off in July 1863 between the forces that Amsterdam has rallied to his side and the Nativists led by Bill. To add to the fireworks, to the obligatory finale, the Union Army has come to New York, rifles blazing, in its mandate to put down the Draft Riots the worst in American history as hundreds of New Yorkers too poor to buy their way out smash and loot the homes of the rich (like the Schermerhorns) and the draft board itself.

While "Gangs of New York" brilliantly recreates the battle scenes both in 1846 and 1863 filmed by Michael Balhaus not in the Big Apple but rather in Rome's Cinecitta massive studios the film is less successful in conveying the psychology of the participants. At one point, a man shouts, "The Irish are taking away the jobs of the real Americans," but since that cry fades quickly we wonder whether that argument, at least somewhat based in rationality, was a principal cause of the ethnic cleansing. Still another offers that the new immigrants owe their allegiance to the pope in Rome and not to the American idea. More likely we can assume that the central cause is hatred, pure and simple the fear of people who are different in culture. Maybe there's something hardwired into human beings that give rise to such animosity. After all, do people not sometimes say when the fighting is done that they feel exhilarated?

As actors Daniel Day-Lewis overshadows Leonardo DiCaprio, who this year feels more at home in the great Spielberg comedy, "Catch Me If You Can." Day-Lewis, performing in the role of a man without moral restraints, is mesmerizing, making us question whether Mayor Michael Bloomberg could succeed in enforcing his no-smoking rules against Bill the Butcher and his coterie of slaughterers.