Gangsters - The Complete Series

See Larger Image	List Price: £39.99 Our Price: £10.98 Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours Manufacturer: Cinema Club Starring: Maurice Colbourne, Ahmed Khalil, Elizabeth Cassidy, Saeed Jaffrey, Paul Barber Directed By: Alastair Reid, Kenneth Ives, Roger Tucker, Viktors Ritelis Average Customer Rating:


Audience Rating: Suitable for 15 years and over Binding: DVD EAN: 5014138302726 Format: Box set Label: Cinema Club Manufacturer: Cinema Club Number Of Items: 4 Publisher: Cinema Club Region Code: 2 Release Date: 2006-04-24 Running Time: 737 Studio: Cinema Club
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Spotlight customer reviews: Customer Rating: Summary: REMEMBER THE COMEDIAN? Comment: My father was the (white) comedian Rolf Day, who introduced every episode and also made brief appearances in both series and I believe in the original Play for Today. The first series was actually shot in the Rum Runner in Birmingham were Durand Durand started off (and Magnum). For the second series they built a mock up of a night club at Pebble Mill. A good example of a 70s production which the US refused to shew as it was deemed too violent but of course by todays standards very tame--how things have changed! More about my father on www.madeinbirmingham.org/clifford.htm Customer Rating: Summary: Highly original, thought-provoking drama with disappointing end Comment: The final episode or two to one side I really enjoyed watching Gangsters. Reminding yourself that it was filmed in the 70s it really does give a fascinating insight into the time and I'm sure was a real cultural eye-opener into the enthnic diversity and underground sub-cultures of Britain. I also rather enjoyed its mixing of genres. Combine this with a great package of many hours of footage together with an OU documentary on the series and it is great value. My one quibble is that the end is terribly disappointing. The increasingly exaggerated parody of genre which had been entertaining and thought-provoking to me went way too far over the last few episodes and became simply irritating. This was particuarly so when it came to the horrendously exaggerated american character who ultimately brings the tale to an end (I won't say how for those who haven't seen it). To the modern ear the racist anti-Chinese comments of the lead female character are also quite jarring. To what extent this is simply due to the passage of time and increasingly sophistication of TV I'm not sure, but I'd definitely recommend this. Customer Rating: Summary: BBC "GANGSTERS" Comment: An excellant drama series that came out when "the Sweeney" was the best series on the box,however it was tame when compared to this! Customer Rating: Summary: brilliant Comment: this is one of the best acted well written series that i have seen, the humour is amazing, and i was transfixed by it, for sure parts of it are a little dated but its incredible , the kung fu scenes are as funny as i have ever witnessed, you have an empathy for joth kline in is journey through the birmingham underworld,paul barbour is immence as is most of the leading actors, what ever happened to chai lee? what a corker Customer Rating: Summary: Dreams of gangsters... Comment: Most long-running drama series eventually end up almost as an inadvertent self-parody, but the comparatively short-lived mid-70s cult classic BBC series Gangsters is one of the few to so openly embrace this fate with each recommission. It's a curious beast, a constantly evolving entity that began as a fairly naturalistic shot-on-film Play For Today before becoming a largely shot-on-tape series with a much more theatrical style increasingly removed from its Get Carteresque roots. By the time the second and last series finished, in a final episode that's one of the most outrageously Brechtian bits of mainstream TV since the finale of The Prisoner, all pretence at realism had gone out of the window. Where writer Philip Martin played a key acting role in the Play For Today episode, in the second series he could occasionally be found on the sidelines dictating the scenes as they happened to a Pakistani typist or reading stage directions to a scene before turning up in the last couple of episodes (billed as Larson E. Whipsnade in a role originally intended for comedian Les Dawson) as a deadly hitman who disguises himself as W.C. Fields... and that's excluding the production crew's tombstones appearing in the surreal funeral scene that also sees the reappearance of at least one dead character, characters deciding to cut their dialogue because a scene is dragging on pointlessly, Terry Downes' comic mishaps with a couple of Molotov Cocktails or the leading lady walking off the set in disbelief. At its best, before it sank under the weight of movie references and pastiches, it's a fascinating portrait of a multicultural Britain seen through its underworlds - Asian people traffickers, black pimps and strippers, Chinese drug dealers, Irish terrorists skimming local businesses to buy bombs - and the way that besieged minorities often feed off each other and find themselves in alliances with the far right would-be white supremacist liberators who are reliant both on the finance and the threat they provide. Indeed, despite causing a storm of controversy when first broadcast in 1976, it was still the first English-language TV show to have a Pakistani hero (Ahmed Kalil's Khan), albeit a less than ethical one who is more than happy to manipulate Maurice Colborne's recently released club owner John Kline from the straight and narrow in his determination to catch Saeed Jaffrey's jovially loquacious crooked community leader. It's definitely hit and miss: sometimes it's uncannily dead on target, at others wildly mannered and unconvincing, with the tone veering from the merely comic to the drearily comic-strip, particularly in the cartoonish movie serial-like second series complete with its over-ripe performances, chapter titles, inscrutable villains straight out of a Fu Manchu knockoff and the most pathetic displays of martial arts ever seen on any screen. In most ways more is lost in the overtly fantastic second series than is gained, though Zia Mohyeddin's character is a welcome addition. Unlike the immigrants who are smuggled in, he's an educated and literate man but shares equally unrealistic expectations of the `Mother Country,' which he still sees as the England of Rudyard Kipling. He's aware that this is a land of the imagination so has no intention to ever go there until circumstances force him to do so, but even so his last scenes are both the most memorable and the most powerful in the entire run of the show. If the show is a distinctly mixed bag, 2Entertain's new Region 2 DVD is an excellent package - remastered versions of both series and the Play For Today with group audio commentaries on 5 episodes as well as an interesting Open University documentary on the show's popular cultural references. More Reviews