David Denby’s review of Scorcese’s Gangs of New York in The New Yorker finds too many faults with it to even call it a flawed masterpiece, but praises Daniel Day-Lewis effusively. So I will have to see the movie but be disappointed. (In an anticipatory mood, I had already watched the relevant episode from the Ric Burns documentary again, and had gone looking for the exact location of Five Points on maps.)

Denby seems to confirm what a previous reviewer intimated: That Gangs shoehorns historical facts into a plot that revolves solely around Protestant nativists and Catholic Irish, at the expense of an exposition of the real losers of the draft riots of 1863: the blacks. The Irish, who most directly competed with blacks at the bottom rung of society, opposed the idea of being drafted into a war that aimed to emancipate blacks in the South. In the ensuing violence, about 100 blacks were maimed, drowned or lynched by the Irish. Some 85 Irish rioters did die before the riots ended; shot by troops sent back from Gettysburg to contain the uprising.