The producer behind hit 1990 film The Krays has said he regrets ‘glamourising’ the East End gangsters in his film 34 years ago and is setting out to revisit the criminals in a new movie.
Ray Burdis has now vowed to show the London mobsters, Ronnie and Reggie Kray, as they really were.
The Krays – which starred real-life brothers and Spandau Ballet stars Gary and Martin Kemp as the notorious Kray twins – portrayed its titular subjects as ‘special boys’ who were close to their mother.
It also didn’t shy away from their fame and power as they committed horrific acts of violence.
But Burdis is now keen to dispel the ‘myth’ that he popularised last time that the Krays were ‘folk heroes’ of any kind, insisting: ‘They were just a pair of cowardly psychopathic bullies, who terrorised the East End of London in the 1960s.’
‘Because I’ve grown up with gangsters as a north London boy, I wasn’t intimidated at all by the Krays. I was intrigued. I wanted to make a film that glamourised them at the time because that’s what you did in those days,’ he said, as per The Observer.
The actor and filmmaker also admitted that he was ‘happy’ when The Krays was first released as it was ‘a big film’ – it grossed approximately £7million at the box office, which was a more than solid showing.
It also boasts an 82% score on review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes, with critics praising it for being ‘not simply a catalogue of stabbings, garrotings and bloodletting’.
‘It goes deeper than into the twisted pathology of twins whose faces would light up with joy when their mum told them they looked just like proper gentlemen,’ Roger Ebert added in his 3.5/4 star review for the Chicago Sun-Times.
However, as Burdis got older he decided that the movie – written by Philip Ridey and directed by Peter Medak – was ‘wrong’ and that he ‘felt bad about certain aspects of the film’.
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‘Although there were violent scenes, we steered away from that. We went for the matriarchal side of it … mummy’s boys, good boys, lovely boys. They fought for their mother – that [was] the premise of the film. The film is about the myth of the Krays. It wasn’t about the reality,’ he added.
Burdis’s new film, which he is writing and attached to direct, is called Last Kings of London.
It is said to be much darker in tone and will also deal with corruption in the police force during the period.
Its tagline boasts: ‘The definitive story of how the police and a member of the general public managed to bring down the infamous 1960s London gangsters.’
Last Kings of London is also sub-headed ‘the Nipper Read Story’, referencing the detective chief superintendent at the Metropolitan Police who finally brought the vicious brothers down.
He was portrayed by Christopher Eccleston in the 2015 movie Legend, in which Tom Hardy famously took on the roles of both Krays.
The new movie will also include the barmaid of The Blind Beggar pub, who witnessed the 1966 shooting of George Cornell and whose testimony was the final blow against the Krays’ court case.
Ronnie and Reggie were arrested in May 1968 and sentenced to life imprisonment the following year, with Ronnie dying in Broadmoor Hospital from a heart attack in 1995 and Reggie being granted compassionate release before his death from cancer five weeks later in 2000.
They gained a certain level of stardom during the course of their mobster reign over the East End from the late 1950s until their arrest by mixing with MPS, socialites and celebrities including Frank Sinatra, Peter Sellers, Dame Joan Collins, Richard Harris and Dame Barbara Windsor.
Burdis met the Krays several times during the making of the 1990 film, paying the twins £100,000 for their life rights.
He said he would make the new film, even if the brothers were still alive, but acknowledges it’s ‘easier now’.
‘A lot of people were terrified of them and even members of their gang, perhaps now, will own up to the fact that “this is how we behaved and it weren’t right”.’
He also shared that he doesn’t think Ronnie and Reggie would be ‘too happy’ about Last Kings of London as it ‘really does show what they were’, which was ‘very sadistic’ and ‘very dangerous’ psychopaths.