historically not correct and politically correct?

Rating: 7/10 (13 January 2003)

Jay Cocks, writer of the story, was more accurate in his historical vision in the other Scorcese movie about New York: The Age of Innocence. There is a difference of ten years between the two movies and you see in Gangs...and the later The Age of Innocence that New York has had a big transformation after the civil war. The Irish immigrants would continue to flow into the States until the end of the century and then the Chinese and Italian immigration started. However, there were no Chinese immigrants during the sixties! So the presence of the Yellows-gang of Chinese is simply not possible. It is also not correct that there were blacks in the Irish gangs. Is this because the producer Harvey Weinstein wanted to give us a politically correct movie with the obliged percentage of blacks? The gang of the Dead Rabbits, to which Amsterdam (Leonardo DiCaprio) belonged, was originated from the Kerry Mountains, not far from Killarney in the South-West of Ireland. The Irish, suffering from hunger and the holocaust by the English, fled to the States (from Baltimore in Ireland f.i.) in terrible circumstances which were hardly better than the slave transportation from West-Africa. Jenny Erverdeane (Cameron Diaz) looks too old for the Young Amsterdam but The Butcher (Daniel Day-Lewis) is a good cast. This movie should have been longer or shorter and not in between because the story has no time to develop and the end is too simple. We learn from this movie also that the civil war was not popular because so many soldiers died (especially immigrants were enrolled by an unfair allotment system ) or were mutilated.