Set in the seedy underworld of London's East End, Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels mixes knockabout farce with Tarentino style action. The plot revolves around four working class lads who pool their money to bet on a high stakes card game. When it all goes wrong, they end up owing half a million pounds and have one week to come up with the cash.
Love, Honor and Obey, starring Jude Law and Johnny Lee Miller, similarly attempts to combine hard men with humour. Gangster No 1, which stars Malcolm Macdowell and David Thewlis, is a much harder-hitting affair which chronicles the rise and fall of a prominent English villain. There's also a follow up to Lock, Stock on the way on the way too. This time directer Ritchie has included some American blood, with Hollywood star Brad Pitt taking on a role.
But which are the classic British gangster films that this new crop of releases aspire to?
Brighton Rock (1947)
Let's start with an oldie. Based on the book by Graham Greene, this film is notable for bringing a vicious realism to British crime cinema. Richard Attenborough gives an excellent erformance as Pinkie, the psychopathic and murderous leader of a Brighton gang. Violence against a setting of racecourses and funfairs.
Get Carter (1971)
Michael Caine is London gangster Jack Carter, who moves up to Newcastle (an industrial city in the North-East of England) to find out the truth about his brother's death. When he gets
there, he discovers that his neice is involved in a blue movie racket. It soon becomes clear that Carter is not a man to be messed with. During the film, he knifes one man in the heart,
pushes another off a multi-storey car park, sends a third out to sea in a shale-truck dumper, shoots a fourth in a ferry-boat ambush, and drowns one girl by accident and another on purpose.
Performance (1970)
The criminal underworld meets hippie culture in this visually stunning film, which was co-directed by Nicholas Roeg (with Donald Cammell). James Fox plays Chas, a gangster involved in a London protection racket. On the run from both the law, Chas is forced to hide in a Notting Hill basement, where he comes into contact with fading rock star Turner (played by Mick Jagger). Sex, psychedilic drugs and violence ensues.
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