“Do you like being a gangster?” asks Frances, both enticed and repulsed. If that all sounds very GoodFellas, it is, the camera swirling, the champagne popping and the jukebox booming as an intoxicating world unfurls the gleam and glimmer of Tom Conroy’s faultless period production only adds to the lustre. Reggie plucks her, aged 16, from under the wing of her domineering mother, and – as you’d expect of ‘The Gangster Prince of the East End’ – noodles her noggin with flash motors, bespoke threads a penchant of waltzing to the best tables at the finest restaurants (even if he does have to sneak into back rooms to sort out business with his bare knuckles). Looking for a way in and perhaps to offer an antidote to all the snarling, beating and killing, writer-director Helgeland, whose best work remains by some distance his script for Curtis Hanson’s LA Confidential, focuses on Reggie’s courtship with local lass Frances Shea (Emily Browning). In the shadows behind the spotlight, however, they cement their status by heading up The Firm, a fearsome gang that deals in robbery, murder, arson, torture and protection rackets.
Always immaculately suited and booted, the Krays, owners of first a billiard hall and then a West End nightclub, hobnob with the rich and famous and become celebs in their own right.
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