8/99 - Associated News - Malcolm McDowell is Gangster No. 1

McDowell is Gangster No.1 by Robin Stringer

    The ugly world of Sixties London gangland is being recreated with chilling authenticity in a new £5 million British film, Gangster No 1, which marks the return of Malcolm McDowell to British movies. At 54, he is bringing that characteristic sense of danger to his role as Gangster, the gangland boss who looks back at his rise to power in a vicious, bloodstained battle with his rival.
    Observant Londoners may have spotted him on location in Soho recently, with fellow stars David Thewlis as his rival Freddie, Saffron Burrows, Freddie's singer-cum-girlfriend - who alone sees through Gangster's ambitions - and Paul Bettany as Gangster when young.
    It has fallen to Scottish director Paul McGuigan, making his first full-length feature, to put flesh on the bones of what he describes as "a very simple story of envy, greed and obsession. There's no good guy versus bad guy here," he says. "It's all degrees of bad-ness. It was an ugly world and it's a world you do not want to glamorize."
    He has gone to some lengths to achieve authenticity, to the extent of employing the real thing. Street fighter and enforcer Roy "Pretty Boy" Shaw, who was jailed for armed robbery, pops up in the opening scene. One adviser on the film is Bruce Reynolds, whose participation 30 years ago in the Great Train Robbery qualifies him to expound to today's film directors on "the group dynamics of a gang". Now rather elderly, he is there primarily to ensure period accuracy in underworld language - and that includes checking McDowell's Cockney accent, fashions, cars and "the type of violence that was predominant".
    Not that Reynolds considers himself a gangster. "That's a question of semantics," he says. "I was a thief. It has been like an albatross round my neck ever since."
    He does consider himself a bit of a film buff and, he proudly reveals, even reviewed Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels for The Guardian. So he is keen to help McGuigan create "the definitive British gangster movie". Apart from Get Carter and Performance, he doesn't rate many. Lock, Stock he dismisses as "very, very cartoonist. Entertainment, yes," he admits, "but I did not believe in any of it."
    He feels differently about Gangster No 1, as does McDowell, the star of Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange and Lindsay Anderson's if...., who left these shores for California over 20 years ago. What lured him back from his Santa Barbara home was Johnny Ferguson's script, based on Louis Mellis and David Scinto's play of the same name, performed at the Almeida Theatre four years ago by Peter Bowles. Sent to him by an old friend, producer Norma Heyman, it impressed him so much as to be irresistible, although he is managing to fit in another film at Shepperton while he is here.
    "The script has the feel of something that was written by Joe Orton," says McDowell. "It stands out. It's more like a Shakespearean or Greek tragedy. It's big. It is about betrayal and loyalties over the space of 30 years. Handsome Freddie, the butcher of Mayfair, topped a copper, which generates a lot of respect for him. He is Gangster No 1 and then gets usurped by me. It's not a takeover, but a betrayal. There is a horrendous scene where the attempted assassination takes place and I am in a car up the road watching it."
    Despite its violence, McDowell regards it as a moral film, "because you see that Freddie wins in the end. He freaks Gangster out so much that he cannot deal with it. He sends him over the top into psychosis, a place where I have been once or twice before," he adds with a grin.
    Leaving the morality of the piece aside, first and foremost what McDowell saw was "a wonderful part". What McGuigan sees from his standpoint is some wonderful actors with their own ideas. "It goes a different way from what you had ever thought of," he says, as he prepares himself for McDowell's "kung fu" scene. "That's why I love doing this job. You don't know what Malcolm is going to do."