Not a success at the box office it is nonetheless notable in that it is one of John Dankworth’s more recent film scores and features contributions from Gilad Atzmon and Martin Shaw. By Selwyn Harris

As he approaches his 80th birthday, John Dankworth’s legacy to British jazz perhaps goes deeper than most people realise. Among his key contributions are a series of cult 1960s British film scores. One person who was evidently clued up about this is the young Scottish film director Paul McGuigan. Hiring Dankworth to come up with the music to his stylish, cockney mobster thriller Gangster No.1 (2000), the bulk of which is set in the 1960s, was something of a masterstroke. It can’t have escaped McGuigan’s notice that Dankworth’s music pervades some of the archetypal British New Wave films of the 1960s, which have much in common with his film.

Dankworth’s music is an important factor in realising the simmering psychological tension behind The Servant, the documentary-style realism of Karel Reisz’s The Lambeth Boys and Saturday Night, Sunday Morning, and the cool, modish swingin’ 60s ambience, albeit with a shadowy twist, of Darling. It’s also worth noting that we might have had Dankworth, rather than Herbie Hancock, scoring Blow Up if he hadn’t been so busy at the time he was approached to do the job.

Gangster No.1 signifies something of a screen comeback for Dankworth. Since the early-1970s, he had virtually given up writing for film, instead concentrating on orchestral conducting and extensive touring schedules following the international success of his wife and singer Cleo Laine. But his penetrating score for Gangster No.1 proves he hasn’t lost his touch. In acting terms, the film also sees a return to the screen of the old star of Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange Malcolm McDowell and creates a new one in Paul Bettany. Both play the unnamed Gangster: McDowell in the present, and Bettany in the main bulk of the film that is a flashback to the 1960s.

Bettany’s performance is brilliantly charged with psychotic menace. He has the iconic lean and mean look of the sharp suited, orange-haired, pasty-complexioned cockney gangster, recalling James Fox in Performance if not Michael Caine in Get Carter, but Bettany’s performance bristles with more malice than both of them put together.

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