The Gangs Of New York

Where To Find And Actually Enjoy The Gangs Of New York

Most people who ask about this film are looking for a download link, but the reality is that Scorsese's 2004 picture isn't exactly easy to find in decent quality anymore. It got pulled from streaming rotation years ago and hasn't made a strong comeback. Your best bet is buying or renting it through Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, or YouTube. The Blu-ray transfer from 2005 is still solid — it's a two-disc set with a 1080p AVC encode that holds up. There are fan uploads on the usual file-sharing sites, but the audio-video sync on most of those is off by about two hundred milliseconds and the color grading looks like someone ran it through a compressor from 2008. If you care about the cinematography at all, which you should because Michael Ballhaus shot this thing specifically for large format presentation, get the physical media. Here's the thing nobody tells you about this movie: it's not actually a gangster film. People go in expecting something close to Goodfellas or The Godfather and they come out confused because the structure is completely different. This is a period drama about identity and assimilation wrapped in a revenge narrative that doesn't really land. The first act runs about eighty minutes and it moves at a glacial pace. I know because I sat through it once trying to give it the benefit of the doubt and nearly fell asleep during the Five Points sewer sequence. The second act picks up when Amontillado shows up and returns three years later, but by then you've already committed two hours to characters who aren't particularly compelling. The historical setting is real enough — the Dead Rabbits, the Bowery Boys, the Irish immigration wave of the 1840s and 1860s — but Scorsese took massive liberties with the timeline and the character composites. Bill the Butcher was based on several real figures including William Poole and George Washington Keene, mashed together into one cartoonish villain. Vallon, the character played by DiCaprio, is fictional. The real Five Points neighborhood didn't look anything like the meticulously constructed set they built at Cinecittà. It was actually far worse and far smaller than what appears on screen.

One thing I noticed on my third viewing that I missed before: the sound design in the later reels is a mess. During the draft riots sequence in the third act, the mix buried the dialogue under crowd noise and explosions. I had to pause and turn on subtitles just to catch what was being said. This seems to be a known issue with the theatrical cut. The DVD commentary confirms that Scorsese was unhappy with the final audio mix but didn't have the budget or time to go back and fix it properly. If you own the Blu-ray, check if there's an alternate audio track — some regions included a DTS-HD Master Audio option that presents the dialogue more clearly.

The Production History You Actually Need To Know

Development hell is the right phrase here. This project sat around for over a decade before it ever got made. Scorsese first tried to film it in the late 1980s with Daniel Day-Lewis attached as Bill the Butcher and a young Leonardo DiCaprio as young Vallon. The budget kept ballooning and the studio kept walking away. HBO came in and funded it as a television miniseries at one point, but that fell apart too. By the time it finally got greenlit in 2002, the cost had reached roughly 100 million dollars, which was enormous for that era. The set construction alone consumed about eighteen months. They rebuilt Five Points at Cinecittà in Rome from scratch — streets, buildings, sewers, everything. Daniel Day-Lewis stayed in character the entire shoot, which is standard for him but worth noting because it reportedly created tension on set. Cameramen have said he would refuse to move from a mark until the lighting was exactly right, even if it meant waiting forty-five minutes between takes. This slowed production considerably. The film received mixed reviews on release and grossed around 193 million dollars worldwide against its budget, which is mediocre for a Scorsese picture. It took home only one Oscar — Best Production Design — despite eight nominations. That single win says everything about how the Academy viewed the rest of the package. The acting, editing, costume design, and sound mixing were all considered adequate at best.

My actual experience with this film has shifted over the years. I watched it for the first time in 2004 and thought it was overrated and boring. I gave it another chance around 2015 when I was researching Gilded Age New York for a project and realized I'd been unfair to it. The world-building is genuinely impressive and the opening forty minutes, before the plot really gets going, contain some of the most detailed period reconstruction ever put on film. The problem remains the runtime and the structural weakness in the middle section. If you're going to watch it, skip ahead during the mid-film lull if you need to. Nobody is keeping score.