Gangs of New York
With Leonardo DiCaprio, Daniel Day-Lewis, Cameron Diaz, Liam Neeson, Jim Broadbent, John C. Reilly, Henry Thomas, Brendan Gleeson, and David Hemmings.
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Scorsese once described his concept of the film as a western set on Mars, which adds two more playgrounds to the above list and helps explain the kind of historical fantasy he had in mind. I know little about New York’s early history, yet I was impressed by how thoroughly he wanted to steep me in its otherness. This is undoubtedly why the title “New York City 1846” doesn’t appear until the end of the prologue, after we’ve spent a good quarter of an hour watching massive crowds of Irish Catholics and American “nativists” hack one another to pieces on a huge foreign-looking turf identified as Manhattan’s Lower East Side, each group trying to eliminate the other.
