Peak Blind

 “Peaky Blinders, Season 6,” directed by Anthony Byrne (partial spoiler alert)

This is the last season of this BBC series, done after the actual death of actress Helen McCrory, who played indomitable Polly Shelby, Romani matriarch of the Shelby crime family of Birmingham.  Set in 1933, the whole season is saturated in more death than usual.  A daughter is lost and a key player has an incurable disease.  Arthur Shelby is an opium and alcohol-addicted wreck, to be saved by his uber-Christian wife.  PTSD flashbacks of WWI tunneling haunt Tommy Shelby, along with seizures.  Errant son Michael Shelby is pledging to murder Tommy from his jail cell.  Michael’s creepy wife, a social-climber played by Anna Taylor-Joy of The Queen’s Gambit, is sticking her makeup-covered rat-face into the crime business.  Tommy’s ally in the Jewish mob in Camden Town, Alfie Solomons, is hiding with opera records.  Ada Shelby attempts to replace Polly, battling the creepy fascists with her socialist wits, but doesn’t have the full stomach for Shelby Ltd.

Over it all is the battle against Sir Oswald Mosely, the head of the British fascist movement, who now has his own vicious, buxom, upper-class Eva Von Braun. Like Mussolini who was a socialist for a time, the real Mosely was a Labour Party member, then quit to form the British Union of Fascists (BUF). The BUF was formed in 1932.  Mosely is pushing for a united block between Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, the U.S. (!) and the “aristocrats and meritocracy” of Britain, who he claims now support fascism. Tommy is still secretly working with Churchill to undermine the fascists by pretending to work with them.  This is his main goal.  A faction of the nationalist IRA in the northern counties of Ireland want an alliance with Hitler and the British BUF, and the Boston Irish mob back them.  Most historians agree signs of this alliance were observed in 1936, a few years later.  (The enemy of my enemy is my friend…the fractured logic of bad politics we now see in the Ukrainian war.)

U.S. prohibition has ended and that money-chain is shut down.  Tommy is claiming his attempt to run illegal opium into Boston for $5M will be his last job.  After that he’ll be building housing for the poor along the canals and quitting crime.  This last job also involves the importation of machine guns for the IRA and a block with the treacherous Irish mob. As a result, his treatment of his wife Lizzie is cruel, as he never tells her what is really going on, is adulterous, abandons her at a key moment, still kills people and generally acts the shit boss.

The only person that really stands up to the Shelbys in this season is a union steward in his Liverpool warehouse where the drugs and guns are stored … with a bust of Lenin behind him.  Even after Tommy points a gun at him, the steward needles him.  This might remind us of Jesse Eden, an aggressive (and real) female union leader in Birmingham, who stood up to Tommy Shelby for a time in earlier seasons.  Tommy, a former rocker with piercing blue eyes was so handsome she couldn't resist ... which is the 'Hollywood' treatment of women.

What are the odds that a criminal gang or gang-leader would fight fascism?  Most criminals go where the money is - who will pay them, where they will be immune from prosecution, where they can keep their enterprises going.  It would not be to the left, as history has shown many times.  Al Capone was a friend of capitalism, while the Mob in Cuba had to be chased out, as they were allies of Batista. Hitler and Mussolini recruited among lumpen gangs, as does Putin. The Peaky Blinders and Tommy are mostly "doomed Romantics" as pictured in this series, as criminals seem to have a continuing fascination on television.  On the other hand, the anti-fascist, Jewish, labor, socialist and communist movements in the U.K. in this season are invisible .  This is the BBC - though they are certainly miles ahead of wretched PBS. Can Mosely be taken down?  If you know your history…

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive of reviews, using these terms:  “Peaky Blinders,” “1917 - Film,” “The Queen’s Gambit” or words like “streaming,” “crime,” “drugs” or “fascism.”

The Cultural Marxist

April 13, 2022