Bloomsbury Film Classics – serie

Presents the screenplay of the classic cult film by Bruce Robinson, with an introduction by the director.

'I'm Scarface. I'm just about ten times as hard-boiled as Johnny Lovo ever thought of being. I've bumped off six or eight myself and another one - especially a rat like you - wouldn't mean a thing in my young life. Get me?' In the mean streets of Chicago, a young man is unwilling to follow his parents into a life of squalor and poverty and hungers to become a big shot. Tony Guarino has grown up in the hard world of the bar and the poolroom, where every gangster is a hero and every cop an enemy. Only the tough make it. At the age of just eighteen, Tony commits his first serious crime. He shoots dead the gang boss and ruthless slayer Al Spingola. In an era when gunplay is still rare, Tony's actions unnerve the other gang leaders, and Tony is catapulted into notoriety and fame. This is just the beginning of his path to becoming the most powerful and feared man in the Chicago underworld.

'Rossi isn't dead yet. And from what I hear, the Rossi brothers are pretty tough monkeys.' Clancy's knuckles whitened on the steering wheel. 'Yeah,' he said. 'They're all tough monkeys. Until they lose those precious ten pints...' Lieutenant Clancy, a tough cop from New York's 52nd Precinct, has been handpicked for an assignment. Assistant District Attorney Chalmers needs him to protect a witness whose testimony is vital. That man is Johnny Rossi, an infamous gangster involved in every West Coast racket from prostitution to gambling, who has turned into a whistle-blower. Shacked up in a fleabag hotel, Rossi should be safe. But when a hood with a shotgun breaks past the police guard and blasts Rossi into a critical condition, Clancy has just seventy-two hours to find out why Chalmers can't keep his mouth shut about his so-called secret case, why Rossi came to New York in the first place, who else knows where he is and when they are coming to finish the job off.

'Popeye here. I am being blocked while he takes off in the other car. This is a deliberate act of obstruction! If anybody reads me - HIT that son of a bitch!' The French Connection is the heart-stopping account of an extraordinary true story. One night two New York narcotics detectives, 'Popeye' Egan and 'Cloudy' Grosso, are at the Copacabana Club when they come across a boisterous party. The host is a young pockmarked man named Patsy Fuca, and he behaves like a head gangster. When he pays his bill from a huge wad of money the detectives instinctively decide to tail him, but they are baffled to discover that Patsy is the owner of a lowly newsstand. It seems so odd that Popeye and Cloudy start to investigate, unaware that they are embarking on an eighteen-month odyssey of intrigue and conspiracy that will take them from plush tree-lined suburbs and dark Brooklyn tenements to Paris, Marseilles and Palermo, and that they will break the world's largest heroin network.