“If you can’t hit ’em, kick’em. If you can’t kick ’em, hit ’em with a fuckin’ brick,” says one veteran hard nut East Ender in Nicola Collins’s documentary about the lives of her father Les and his mates. “I don’t worry about the authorities. The authorities worry about me,” says another. He can say that again. 

Collins films her subjects in black-and-white, capturing the gnarled faces of these sometimes very smartly attired ex-cons, bare-knuckle fighters and former ne’er-do-wells carefully and eloquently. None of them are natural charmers, though their age and slightly doubtful sense of humour lends them a kind of old boy Cockney sparkle. East London, they all say, has changed beyond all recognition.

It used to be a tough, rough place to live in, and you had to know what you were about. But amidst the violence and thuggery there was a sense of community that is now lost for ever. You never grassed on your mates and you always helped old ladies cross the road. There was honour among thieves.

Were this the main thrust of The End, it would be culpable of a dubious kind of gangster nostalgia with which we are now familiar. Typically, the actor that all the gangsters most admire is Robert De Niro, even if they think films glamorise criminals and their lives.

However, the second half of this most watchable debut sows a few doubts. The old sweats admit that prison has wasted half their lives, that they indeed “done wrong” and, in two cases, that God has saved them from themselves.

Having had personal experience of several of the participants during a murkier past than now, I can vouch for their propensity to whack their way out of trouble, sometimes with iron bars — but also for the fact that, if you gave them respect, they would do anything to see you right.
 
They may be strange old dinosaurs of a different age, and often laughably like caricatures but Collins’s film (produced by her twin sister, Teena) correctly suggests it was “poverty wot did it”. This is not to say that all the old East Enders were like this bloody-minded crew but rather that they had to use whatever means they could to climb out of their situation. No worse than bankers, in fact.