From the East End to the West Coast: gangster film aims for US hit

A low-budget British gangster movie is set to emulate the success of Bend it like Beckham in America after being bought by an US distribution group.

Charlie , made for less than £2m, tells the tale of the violent Sixties gang boss Charlie Richardson.

It stars the former 1980s pop singer Luke Goss in the title role, as well as Leslie Grantham from EastEnders and his former screen wife, Anita Dobson. Steven Berkoff, known in the US for his roles in films such as Beverly Hills Cop, also stars, as Richardson's father.

The film, boosted by a strong review in the industry bible Variety , has been bought in America by the Syndicate Production Company for cinema distribution, which has a relationship with Twentieth Century Fox to take the DVD and television rights.

Residents of Chicago and New York, cities which have their own strong gangster tradition, are likely to be the first to see the movie, released in the UK in February, later this year.

Malcolm Needs, the director, said yesterday: "If you hit a stream, it may happen. An American release for a small movie like this is fantastic."

Steve Turney, the sales director for Equator Films who struck the deal, said it was particularly impressive for such a small-scale British movie to have a big studio like Fox behind it. The number of screens it would be released on in the States was still being negotiated, he said. But the Americans would undoubtedly target the same audience the film had proved a hit with in Britain - young males aged between 18 and 35.

Mr Needs said that he had not wanted to make a gangster movie originally. It was meeting the real-life Charlie Richardson that persuaded him. "He was so engaging that I thought this isn't just a gangster movie. There's more to this than thuggery," Mr Needs said.

Yet the distinctive genre of the British gangster movie, stretching back through The Krays to The Long Good Friday and Get Carter has wide currency.

The film is set in the Sixties when the Kray brothers dominated the crime scene north of the river and south London belonged to the Richardsons. The film features one of the biggest trials of the time when, on the same day as England won the World Cup, Richardson was arrested and tried for running an empire built on fear, torture and extortion.

Even today some of the files relating to "the Torture Trial" remain sealed, presumably because of Richardson's close links to the police and the CIA.

"Nearly 40 years after the case, there are still documents that are not going to be released for another 30 years," Mr Needs said.

Reviewing the film when it was released in the UK, Variety said: "The catalogue of nasty British films about nasty British gangsters gains a powerful, very unsettling entry with Charlie , an offbeat biopic."

Goss follows on the heels of his fellow 1980s pop stars, Gary and Steve Kemp of Spandau Ballet, who played the Kray brothers in The Krays movie in 1990.

At the 57th Cannes Film Festival last night actor Billy Bob Thornton returned to promote his role in the black comedy Bad Santa , directed by Terry Zwigoff and produced by the Coen brothers.

"It's a radical perversion of the traditional Christmas tale," he said.