…and I’m not too impressed. Horribly bloody, and lots ofpointless violence. I know Scorsese did not set out to make a historically accurate movie, but there was a lot that just didn’t make sense to me:
-The “priest” had children (including Leo DeCaprio’s character)…I didn’t know that RC priests were marrier in 1840’sIreland!
-the beautiful prostitute/pickpocket wants to go to San Francisco…why wouldlife be any better there than in NYC?
-Boss Tweed: why did he need somebody like “Butcher” Bill? My understanding was that Boss Tweed essentially funded all of the politicians, via Tammany Hall. Since he owned them all, why did he need vicious criminals like the Butcher?
The opening scene (the horribly bloody battle between the “dead rabbits” and the nativists)-is there any evidence that such battles actually took place? And why was Butcher Bill so respectful of the Priest?
-in the 162 draft riots (which actually took place) did the US Navy actually bombard the 5 points neighborhood from warships? Seems like a messy way to pacify a neighborhood!
The big building that housed the plug-uglies-did all these people actually support themselves through thievery? You’d think the uptown rich people would have found some way to protect themselves.
Overall, I found the movie pretty devoid of any sensible plot, and the Butcher bill character pretty strange-the guy survives being knifed, shot, etc…all without benefit of modern medicine. And, even though he runs the gangs, he still likes to practice his profession (carving up animlas-why??)
I wondered about Priest Vallon having a son too. I wondered if Amsterdam was an adopted son, an Irish orphan that The Priest took in, but haven’t found a real explanation for it.
Jenny wants to go to San Francisco for the same reason anyone has wanted to go West: it’s the idea of a fresh start, new opportunities, etc. It’s a pipe dream but it’s HER pipe dream, if you know what I mean.
Boss Tweed needed Bill to keep “order” in the Five Points. Consider him one of Tweed’s subcontractors.
Bill actually explains why he respects The Priest so much-- this was someone who had honor, who had bested in him combat, who had integrity, strength, a true leader. Bill put out his own eye b/c he couldn’t meet The Priest’s eye after The Priest defeated him. Bill aspired to be the kind of man The Priest was. Yes, it’s warped to kill someone you respect so much, but there was a whole Golden Bough thing going on there.
Re: the firing on the Five Points by warships: I don’t think that actually happened.
I liked the movie overall. Daniel Day-Lewis was the movie for me, though. DiCaprio wasn’t too impressive, but he didn’t ruin it for me either.
I don’t know that it was true to history, but it was pretty true to the book.
The book purports to be a pretty straight history. But it is very dream-like. It’s prone to fantastical exageration. It’s a facinating and beautiful book, and the movie caputured a lot of that.
I don’t think the Five points were shelled by warships, but otherwise, the movie actually made the Draft Riots seem LESS violent then they actually were.
Read New York Low Life, by Luc Sante. It’s a very informative book about that time in New York. Because of it, I knew about the Five Points and the Dead Rabbits before seeing the movie, which helped.
Anyway, according to him, every single cop in the city was killed or wounded in those riots. I was impressed by the fact that the actual Army had to be called in. Not just a nationalized National Guard, but the Army itself. Basically, it was a miniature insurrection, which is how it was seen at the time. In that context, it might not have been entirely out of line to call in some shelling from the Navy. But I don’t remember reading about anything like that in the book above, and I think I would have remembered reading something that out of the ordinary.
I took Liam Neeson’s character to be more of a “Priest” Vallon, than an actual Priest named Vallon, if you know what I mean. He was a larger than life type, leader of the Dead Rabbits, and was known for being religious or quoting the bible, so people called him “Priest”. It was never explained in the movie, but that’s what I assumed. Or maybe they just called him that because he kicked people’s asses with a huge metal cross.
I was a bit surprised by this as well. Scorsese has depicted violence so brutally and disturbingly in his previous films that I was expecting the Draft Riots sequence to be a real shocker. He did show one black person being stabbed to death, strung up, and set on fire, and there was the fairly graphic sequence when the mob is fired on, but all in all he seemed pretty restrained about it. Maybe he’s just mellowing as he gets older.
I’d definately say that the name “Priest” was just a nickname due to his religious beliefs. (Remember the medal and the Celtic cross he carried).
I thought that it was kind of neat that Daniel Day Lewis played Robert De Niro playing Bill the Butcher.
During the movie, half of me wanted NYC to burn to the ground, but the other half was saying “USA! USA! USA!”
Not as affective as some of Scorsese’s stuff, but certainly not a bad flick.
Priest could have been a priest who forsook his vows. More likely, in the movie story, he would not have been a real priest - the Catholic church was suppressed in Ireland, and there were very few priests, and as a result, most of the Irish in the 1850’s would not have received a good - or any - religious education. Priest could have been someone who could read and read the bible to the immigrants. A real priest of that time, Bishop Hughes (Dagger John) of New York helped turn the Irish from one cliche (thieves, prostitutes) to another (nuns, cops, school teachers) in a single lifetime. Catholics were considered stange and slightly evil at the time - that damn pope and all, and in the movie, the real priest is simply a silent monkish figure.
The Navy did not shell New York. I don’t think they could get enough elevation to clear the five and six story buildings common in lower Manhattan, and the crowds were simply moving too fast. The Army did come in with veterans of Gettysburg, just days before, and they were in no mood for a bunch of draft dodgers.
…how did Butcher Bill throw knives so well? he was one-eyed, and I thought you needed two eyes to have depth perception.
And, that chinese opium den on Mott street…why did they put on those elaborate Chinese operas, for a bunch of zonked-out opium addicts?
I also got the impression that priest was more a title of respect than the actual profession of Valon.
Two reasons for the prostitute. The gold (she tells Amsterdam about how people just stumbled on the stuff there) and San Francisco is on the other side of the country, about as far as you can get from New York and still be on the US. She goes out of her way to show how far they’d have to travel to get there.
Tweed needed muscle and influence at the Five Points and that was Bill’s job.
Yes. Bill respects Vallon because he was honorable and was the only one to ever best him in battle.
I don’t think the ships fired.
As to Bill, he was extremelly resillient. It happens. To get shot or stabbed in a non-vital area is not a death sentence. He was powerfull and influential but he wasn’t rich. He had more money than most at the Five Points, maybe more than anybody but he still needed a steady source of income. That and I got the impression that he liked it.
But during the Civil War, after William March Tweed became leader of the Tammany Club (in 1860) and chairman of the New York County Democratic Party, Tammany Hall was marred by graft and corruption. Between 1865 and 1871, crooked politicians swindled an estimated $75 million (that’s approximately $816,588,890 in today’s dollars) from New York City.
As Tammany Hall degenerated into a power-hungry greed machine, its members looked to local gangs as “enforcers.” Intent on having their favored candidates win elections, Tammany politicians dispatched gang members to polling places. Even though they intimidated tenement dwellers from places like “Rag Picker’s Corner” and “Bottle Alley” to vote for Tammany-backed candidates, gangs were neither arrested nor prosecuted.
Boss Tweed and his minions were not the only politicians who used local gangs to bully the poor of New York. The Native American political party was aligned with gangs from The Bowery. Gangs from Five Points were aligned with Tammany Hall. And Paradise Square where most of the scenes took place had so many saloons, brothels, and other dark establishments that were habitats of the Gangs were co-owned by Tweed and his flunkies that the line between the politcal and the gangs were extremely blurred.
Indeed, and more than likely it actually happened at Paradise Square at onetime. Whether it be for the purpose of just hate for each other remains lost but there was political motives. But what is known is that the main big warring factions were The Bowery Boys for the Nativists and The Dead Rabbits for the Tammany/or themselves. As you seen in the movie, the gangs themselves were blanketed under a Native or the Five Points Gangs.
The Five Points Gangs were consisting mainly of the Chichesters, Roach Guards, Plug Uglies, Shirt Tails, and Dead Rabbits with the Dead Rabbits being the biggest gang (and most Irish)
The Nativists consisted of the Bowery Boys (largest and most important), the True Blue Americans, the American Guards, the O’Connell Guards, and the Atlantic Guards.
Because guns themselves were hard to come by, the battles were mostly as such in the beginning. Hand to hand combat, knife fighting, bludgeons and a hell of a lot of blood split.
Probably not but then again, take into the effect of media control after the riots which lasted nearly a week straight, it could have happened. What was reported was about 300 people were killed but factual accounts put that total at probably around 2000-3500. The scenes of the row upon row of corpses was probably accurate. Taken this into account and with all the military in the area as well as the known number of building destroyed in the area (something like 300 razed), it is entirely possible someone got the bright idea to ‘quell’ the rioters with a broadside or 2. Stupid, but entirely possible.
Regarding the opium den opera performances, remember opium (along with everything else) was legal in those days. I think based on today’s values and received wisdom about drugs of that sort, we are overly quick to assume that a user would be too incapacitated to watch a performance. But I always imagined that they must have had some sort of music or entertainment in those places.
Then about the married priest…could he have been a Church of England vicar, from the Protestant population of Northern Ireland?
I assumed that Priest was a nickname, or even his proper, given name. People named their children wierd things back then. But, it could also be that he came to the priesthood late in life, after starting a family. Probably after or as a result of his wife died. He certainly wasn’t Protestant: his son worships in a Catholic church and regularly curses out Protestant ministers. Most of the Irish immigrants in this period were Catholic, and Priest led the largest Irish gang in NY. Irish Catholics would never have followed an Irish Protestant.
Oh, of course, it’s also possible that Priest Vallon was a priest who slept around. It does happen, you know. Hell, there have been Popes with whole families before. Anyone remember the Borgias?
I certainly got the idea that “Priest” Vallon was a nickname. He’s never called “Fr. Vallon”, which would be a normal title for a RC priest.
It appeared to me that Boss Tweed had Bill’s help at the beginning of his career. Later, Bill became an embarassment, and a potential liability, with Boss Tweed trying to influence so many Irish.
As for the building which housed so many, that was rebuilt from photographs of a building in the Five Points area. And many of those people probably weren’t thieves - they were day laborers and immigrants who couldn’t afford even the worst tenement slum. Remember, back then it was common (and legal) to have signs “Irish Need Not Apply”. The Irish came from one horrible situation into another, but at least one where most of them could work their way out of.
The RL Bill the Butcher was gravely wounded during (or before) the riots, I believe, but he lived for quite sometime. Do you think everyone who was injured or had surgery died? Although I’m sure some succumbed to infection, others must’ve lived, why else would they keep treating people? As for “carving up animals” - that was his legitimate occupation as well as probably a hobby. I’m sure many a psychopath likes to play with his toys.
Overall I liked the movie. Not, perhaps, as much as the critics, but I liked it.
StG
He died sometime around 1857, according to Herbert Asbury, author of “The Gangs of New York”.
Catholic Emancipation took place in 1829 and a large number of the penal laws had been repealed before the turn of the century. By the 1850s there would have been no shortage of Catholic priests. I still got the impression that “Priest” in this case was just a nickname.
Also, was Jenny actually a prostitute? I know that was implied for much of the film, but I can’t remember any evidence that she actually slept with anyone apart from Bill and Amsterdam, both of whom she clearly loved.
I had heard there are some old buildings in that area that still show damage from cannon fire today. I can’t remember where, though.
>> And why was Butcher Bill so respectful of the Priest?
I mean no disrespect, but if you have to ask , I don’t think it would make much sense explaining in the first place.
Watch the movie again in 5 years time, maybe you’ll understand then, grasshoppper. (The Butcher explains the “why” himself in the movie, btw… ok… soooo… WHO was drunk when watching it ? Hmmmmmm ? 
)