Before becoming known as the city of wealth and power that never sleeps, New York was a very different place, a fledgling young city where the desire for a better life raged in crime-ridden streets.

Here, as the nation's own survival was being tested by the American Civil War, a vast and dangerous underworld was born in the streets.

These were the Gangs Of New York, whose racketeering, bootlegging, swindling, gambling and murdering would become legendary and whose culture of corruption threatened the very survival of America's working people.

Director Martin Scorsese brings the epic drama of early America to the screen in a sweeping story about an era whose conflicts helped to define who and what makes an American. Against the backdrop of this brave new world unfolds a story about a fatherless son's search for honour, vengeance and the courage to remake his life.

Scorsese says: "Ever since I was a child growing up in Lower Manhattan, I was drawn to stories of old New York. Each day, as I explored the neighbourhood streets, I slowly uncovered clues to an extraordinary but relatively unknown period in the city's and our country's history.

"The 1860s seemed to overflow with unbelievable stories of the working classes; of the waves of immigrants who crowded the streets and alleyways; of the corrupt politicians; and of the legends of the underworld who fought to control it all. They are the stories of the testing of America and what the young country stood for. They are the stories of our roots."

Gangs Of New York introduces today's world to the Five Points, a dark, teeming corner of the city known to New Yorkers of long ago as the centre of vice and chaos. Into this frontier of extreme lawlessness arrives the young Irish American Amsterdam Vallon (Leonardo DiCaprio). Amsterdam is the orphaned son of the slain Priest Vallon (Liam Neeson) once chief warrior of the Dead Rabbits gang that rallied the Irish immigrants of the Five Points and a man intent on a reckoning.

After 16 long years in a House of Refuge, Amsterdam has returned to the Five Points to hunt down his father's killer. His target is William Cutting, AKA "Bill the Butcher" (Daniel Day-Lewis), who has since become the merciless new leader of the neighbourhood, a Nativist who detests the newly arrived immigrants.

"This was an extraordinary era for the working classes and the underworld," explains Scorsese, "a time when society was broken into tribes, and the tribes were constantly at war with one another. But unlike the American gangs of today, they were politically orientated."

The prospect of reuniting with Scorsese lured Daniel Day-Lewis out of semi-retirement the pair had previously worked together on The Age of Innocence. The process by which Day-Lewis approaches his roles, utterly losing himself in the complex personalities of his characters, is widely known. In addition to reading books and researching the period, Day-Lewis even apprenticed with a butcher to learn the details of Bill's business and left no area of Bill's life unturned.

Cameron Diaz takes the role of Jenny Everdeane, the alluring pickpocket who is a master of stealing both men's hearts and their possessions.

Diaz was taken by her character's sense of hope. "Life is tough for Jenny - there's violence, brutality, murder, poverty and sickness everywhere. But she's seen the uptown world and understands there's something better," she says. "Jenny knows it's time to move on, but the question is how to do that and survive."

January 9, 2003 12:00