Thank you all for the replies on this.

Interesting that the conversation on Gangs moved to the old directors
cut/exhibited cut antagonism. This followed Robert (Ko.)'s original comment
suggesting that some such antagonism or the image of it can perhaps be seen
as thematically internal to the film.

Adrian, I was pleased to read about the film in the terms sketched in your
take on Alain Masson's POSITIF piece. I was interested in the descriptions
of style - which is what is at issue in most of the critiques I have read -
including the exhibition/directors cut thing - but the issue needs to be
carefully articulated and the style carefully described. This style was what
kept me fascinated throughout, yet it is precisely what many find unhappy in
the exhibited film - namely the 'chaos' - chaos as a kind of wild, alien
organisation.  So I can appreciate why Robert (Ko.) might have been moved to
see the film as having thematically subsumed the directors-natural vs the
exhibited-alien cut antagonism.  No one or thing (including  films cut by
the wild and wonderful Bill The Butcher's 'air tossed cleaver' or by Thelma
Schoonmaker) 'has the wound you expected'.

I am not sure that Scorcese is quite nostalgic for the lively confusion or
chaos of that tribal cruelty, but he had me fascinated, and/so/but I was
almost relieved (and fascinated by my own reaction) when the navy started
that good old 'unnatural violence' of shelling.

Could this chaos as theme subsume and redeem that final shot? It seems we
all want to take a cleaver to some bits. My co-viewing friend thought that
final shot should have been penultimate to one with the WTC towers cut off
by another incarnation of organised chaotic violence. Personally, I liked
the traffic sounds after the U2 song in the credits. Whatever, I wont
rummage through Richard's collection and pull out 'flawed masterpiece'. I am
off to read some of the recommended pieces for better words.

Meanwhile to Robert (Ke), thanks for pointing me to your FFH piece. Your
final comment - 'It's all history now and seems like a different world, but
how will our own illusions and prejudices and styles look half a century
from now' - spoke to my interest in the problem of how this film takes up
cultural material and film-cultural-styles that are so sort of safely in the
past. All the aesthetic, dramatic, political and ethical ground seems to be
so thoroughly worked, formed and encapsulated by so much quotation and
knowingness that you are tempted to say that the film is all just too easy
and given and shucks. But affectively it's not - certainly not in the way
that a lot of period films of books are. I suspect it is precisely the
function of melodrama to be able to do this overdone thing without overdoing
it, to rescue passion from its artistically highly ornamented preserved
historical forms. I am not quite sure exactly how this is done, but I was
impressed by the way Haynes et al did it. Your comment made me think about
how the quality of our use of the past may depend upon our sense of how the
future is likely to use us, and that an almost anachronistic or ahistorical
thing like melodrama is vertigonously historical. (This reminds me of a
sense I had in one scene when a reflection of a 2002 jet flies across a 1957
car window).

Ross