Reggie Kray, Micky Fawcett, singer Lita Roza, Ronnie Kray, actress Barbara Windsor & actor Ronald Fraser in the 1960s
In a blog a couple of weeks ago, I was saying the word ‘gangster’ is a strange word but, if it has to be used, then Micky Fawcett, a close associate of the Kray Twins, probably counts as one.
A former one. He wrote the highly-admired memoir Krayzy Days.
I got talking to him about movies.
JOHN: You told me that people in the business like The Godfather: Part II. That surprised me.
MICKY: Did it?
JOHN: It’s a lovely film, but I think about two-thirds of it is in Sicilian. I think Paramount considered putting it up for an Oscar as Best Foreign Language Film.
MICKY: Maybe that’s why people liked it. My favourite ones usually are the French ones – I’m watching one now on television – Spiral – this is the second series – it’s a subtitled French police thing.
JOHN: Oh, like those Scandinavian noir TV series.
MICKY: Not so much the Scandinavian ones; more the French.
JOHN: Why?
MICKY: Realistic. In the last one I saw, there were two policemen on a stake-out who have a fight with each other. You didn’t get that in Dixon of Dock Green. When I was growing up, everyone used to say: Oh! English gangster films! They’re useless! I remember them talking in The Kentucky Club with Joan Littlewood and one of her crew. You go down to get costumes for them films and you get a black shirt and a white tie… but nobody dresses like that! They were in the Kentucky surrounded by genuine gangsters.
MICKY: They didn’t do much for me. There was Villain with Richard Burton…
JOHN: That was based on the Krays, wasn’t it?
MICKY: Richard Burton thought he was playing Ronnie Kray, yeah.
JOHN: Why was that good?
MICKY: I never said it was.
JOHN: It just felt to me like watching Richard Burton playing a part. I never really believed in it. I believed Donnie Brasco.
MICKY: Yes, that was very good. But it was too good for the ordinary person.
JOHN: Why?
MICKY: Well, people like to see more shooting and violence and all that type of thing if they’re gonna watch a gangster film. But Donnie Brasco was very, very realistic. The scenes with Al Pacino in the house. A really, really good film.
JOHN: I don’t know if it’s true, but there was a distinction made in it that, if you introduced someone as “a friend of mine” he was a friend of yours but, if you introduced someone as “a friend of ours” he was a made man in the Cosa Nostra.
MICKY: That worked. It used to. They’re gone now: the Mafia. It’s the Russians now.
JOHN: I think maybe it helped it was made by an English director – Mike Newell, who did Four Weddings and a Funeral – he could see things objectively.
MICKY:Goodfellas I liked – That beginning and the cigarette as a currency.
JOHN: I don’t really like Martin Scorsese – in Mean Streets they really did just mutter.
MICKY: No. No. The trouble is, for me… If you was a professional footballer, you wouldn’t really want to watch films about professional football too much, because you’d be criticising them all day long. When you’re surrounded by it, as I was for years…