With The Irishman, Netflix successfully brings gangster films back from the dead

It is tempting to regard Martin Scorsese’s new gangster film The Irishman as a swan song. Scorsese is 76. His lead actors, Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, are 75 and 79 respectively. Over the last half century, they’ve been involved in many classic crime movies, among them The Godfather (1972) and Goodfellas (1990), Heat (1995) and Once Upon a Time in America (1984).

They are today’s equivalents to stars and directors from Hollywood’s golden era like James Cagney, Edward G Robinson and Humphrey Bogart, or Howard Hawks and Raoul Walsh. However, time has caught up with them. You can’t imagine they will be given many more opportunities to collaborate on mobster epics like The Irishman, a world premiere at the New York Film Festival next month, whose budget is being listed as being anything between $140m and $200m.

Historically, gangster movies have been a young person’s genre. We all know the basic formula: the kid growing up on the wrong side of the tracks gets lured into petty crime, blossoms forth as a charismatic gangland boss and then dies in a hail of bullets or on the electric chair, just in time for the final credits.

Whether it’s Cagney yelling “Made it ma! Top of the world!” as a tanker explodes behind him at the end of White Heat (1949) or Al Pacino’s Tony Montana blasting away with his machine gun before being shot himself and tumbling into a fountain at the finale of the remake of Scarface (1983), the gangster anti-heroes make spectacular exits.

Epics which lasted three hours like Heat, The Godfather or Once Upon a Time in America were exceptions. Gangster films were generally wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am affairs, with live-hard-die-fast heroes.

In the age of HBO, Netflix and box sets, it is clear that the gangster formula is changing. There has been a process of enlargement. From The Sopranos and Boardwalk Empire to Narcos and Peaky Blinders, any self-respecting gangster drama now has a narrative complexity and depth of characterisation which puts Proust and Tolstoy to shame. The flashbacks and interlinking storylines which seemed so radical in Once Upon a Time in America are now relatively commonplace.

The Irishman is adapted from the 2004 true crime book by Charles Brandt, I Heard You Paint Houses. The book is disarming, not at all what you expect. It is based on the reminiscences of union official Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran (played by De Niro in the film), a mob enforcer who was very close to teamster union boss, Jimmy Hoffa (Pacino), but who was intimately involved in his disappearance in 1975.

Brandt, a lawyer before he became an author, met Sheeran after being retained by the Philadelphia mob to secure the Irishman’s early release from jail on health grounds. Sheeran liked the lawyer and later gave him a series of interviews between 1991 and his death, aged 83, in 2003.

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In a final interview, a few weeks before he died, Sheeran made a startling confession about the “final chapter of the Hoffa tragedy, a crime that has hurt and haunted everyone connected with it”.

The book is full of mobster jargon, real or invented. When mobsters talk on the phone, they’re guarded. They don’t know when the feds might be listening.

“The first words Jimmy [Hoffa] ever spoke to me were, ‘I heard you paint houses,’” Sheeran reminisces about his coded and very macabre first conversation with the notorious teamster boss. “The paint is the blood that supposedly gets on the wall or the floor when you shoot somebody. I told Jimmy, ‘I do my own carpentry work, too.’ That refers to making coffins and means you get rid of the bodies yourself.”

In the US, I Heard You Paint Houses has provoked controversy and some scepticism. Experts on the disappearance of Hoffa have pointed out that Sheeran was a killer and a confirmed liar. They question whether his reminiscences are to be trusted. They also find it suspiciously convenient that the “Irishman” would suddenly clear up the mystery of Hoffa’s death in a single interview with Brandt. Others including cops, journalists and authors had been investigating the disappearance of the teamster boss for years without getting close to the truth.

Observers have even questioned the book’s title. As Slate magazine recently pointed out, “in all of mob literature, fictional and factual”, there is no other mention of Sheeran’s “painting houses” euphemism for murder.

Misgivings about the subject matter and about the venerable age of the director and his two stars (as well as co-stars Joe Pesci who is now 76 and Harvey Keitel, now 80) were presumably factors in Paramount, the original backers of Scorsese’s movie, declining to finance the film. However, Netflix was far bolder. As Scorsese acknowledged at the Marrakech Festival last December: “People such as Netflix are taking risks. The Irishman is a risky film. No one else wanted to fund the pic for five to seven years. And of course we’re all getting older. Netflix took the risk.”

The Irishman isn’t just a gangster film which spans decades and touches on mob violence, political corruption and the distortion of the American dream. It’s an intimate, self-reflexive affair in which memory plays a very prominent part. In the book, Sheeran, speaking in the first person, recounts the story of his friendship with Hoffa and the sequence of events leading to Hoffa’s vanishing. He provides vivid character sketches of the various thugs who want Hoffa gone.

Among them is Tony “Pro” Provenzano, “a made man and a captain in the Genovese family in Brooklyn” who threatens to “rip Jimmy’s guts out with his bare hands and kill his grandchildren”, and the very sinister mobster boss Russell Bufalino. (“The madder he got the softer Russell talked.”)

Tony Pro and Bufalino are stock types in gangster stories. The book, though, suddenly veers off into Sheeran’s stream of conscience remembrances of his impoverished Irish Catholic Philadelphia childhood, his youth working in a travelling carnival and his wartime service with the 45th infantry division, called by General Patton his “killer division”.

Sheeran’s account of his wartime experiences at Monte Cassino and at Anzio or liberating Dachau read like something that might have been written or filmed by pulp writer, director and ex infantryman, Sam Fuller. He uses colloquial, understated language to describe the most horrific and violent events. “You had seen the damnedest things. Emaciated bodies stacked up like logs in a concentration camp,” he recalls. His later casual disregard for human life was, it is implied, heavily influenced by the wartime trauma.

More old-fashioned and conventional gangster films wouldn’t have known how to accommodate Sheeran’s back story. However, Scorsese has been given license to make exactly the film he wants – at the length he wants. At the time of writing, the running time for The Irishman is yet to be confirmed but it’s likely to clock in close to the three hour mark. The director has also been able to use CGI for the “youthification” of De Niro, Pesci, and Pacino, as he called it in a recent interview.

“It’s a project that Robert De Niro and I started talking about a long time ago, and we wanted to make it the way it needed to be made. It’s also a picture that all of us could only have made at this point in our lives,” Scorsese commented when The Irishman was chosen as closing film of the London Film Festival.

Film lovers are understandably wary about giant video-on-demand platforms which use algorithms to measure and manipulate audiences. They are concerned, too, about the way these platforms undermine traditional releasing patterns by refusing to allow films proper runs in cinemas. Nonetheless, the platforms are currently far bolder with their commissioning strategy than the traditional studios.

Scorsese and his collaborators may now be Hollywood’s old guard but that hasn’t stopped Netflix from supporting them. Whatever the response to it, The Irishman is a gangster film perfectly suited to a new age in which the streaming giants are enabling filmmakers to stretch the boundaries of genres like the gangster film which, not so long ago, looked almost as moribund as Jimmy Hoffa himself.

‘The Irishman’ receives its international premiere on 13 October at the BFI London Film Festival; there will be simultaneous preview screenings taking place at cinemas across the UK