With The Irishman, Netflix successfully brings gangster films back from the dead

Martin Scorsese and his collaborators may now be Hollywood’s old guard but that hasn’t stopped Netflix from supporting their latest epic, writes Geoffrey Macnab​

(Netflix)

It is tempting to regard Martin Scorsese’s new gangster film The Irishman as a swan song. Scorsese is 76. His lead actors, Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, are 75 and 79 respectively. Over the last half century, they’ve been involved in many classic crime movies, among them The Godfather (1972) and Goodfellas (1990), Heat (1995) and Once Upon a Time in America (1984).

They are today’s equivalents to stars and directors from Hollywood’s golden era like James Cagney, Edward G Robinson and Humphrey Bogart, or Howard Hawks and Raoul Walsh. However, time has caught up with them. You can’t imagine they will be given many more opportunities to collaborate on mobster epics like The Irishman, a world premiere at the New York Film Festival next month, whose budget is being listed as being anything between $140m and $200m.

Historically, gangster movies have been a young person’s genre. We all know the basic formula: the kid growing up on the wrong side of the tracks gets lured into petty crime, blossoms forth as a charismatic gangland boss and then dies in a hail of bullets or on the electric chair, just in time for the final credits.