Dirty Deeds: Mob Rules.

Dirty Deeds opens in cinemas on Thursday, the Dirty Deeds soundtrack is in stores now.

As a nation founded by convict settlement, it’s hardly surprising we can churn out a decent crime pic. A look back at the last couple of years finds films like Two Hands, Chopper and The Hard Word doing serious business at the Aussie box office. Dirty Deeds, released this week, may well be the finest of them all.

Set in the late 60s, Dirty Deeds dives head first into the seedy world of Sydney’s illegal casinos. Barry Ryan is running the business, but the Americans are trying to muscle into his territory, and send a couple of mafia types over to sort out the deal. Played by the highly regarded Bryan Brown, he’s a likeable, genuine bloke, but deep down he’s one hard bastard.

“I might be dead if I’d gone that way,” he chuckles. “I don’t think I want to be a crim.”

But there’s little denying on screen he’s the real deal. As well as his work in front of the camera, Brown was also involved in the films production.

“David Caesar (director) spoke to me back at the Toronto film festival in 1996,” he explains. “He was there with Idiot Box, which he wrote and directed, and I was there with Dead Heart, which I produced and acted in. He reminded me of a certain time, or a certain incident that I’d heard of by showing me a photograph of one of Sydney’s colourful identities with two other Italian American looking blokes with guns on a pig hunt in Northern New South Wales. What is was all about is the mafia wanting to come to Australia in the late sixties to get in on the money made from illegal gambling.”

“All we know about their time here is that this colourful Sydney identity took them on a pig hunt, and afterwards they went home to America and didn’t have anything to do with Australia any more. What actually happened out there, no one knows, and if anyone does, they’re not revealing it. The Sydney character is now dead, and so is one of the mafia guys. The police, the politicians and the crims had a pretty good thing going, and they weren’t about to hand it over to the Yanks. Sydney in the late 60s, that was well tied up.”

“David thought there was a rich old yarn in that, and asked me to play Mr Big. It was a chance to get in right at the beginning of something, and we might be able to make something really good.”

While Dirty Deeds is the end result of five years work, both Ceasar and Brown worked on other projects. Ceasar put together Mullet, while Brown’s numerous roles saw him crop up in another Aussie crime pic, Two Hands, also playing a mob boss in modern day Sydney.

“It wasn’t a problem for me, but I think it scared the shit out of David when he saw Two Hands,” he laughs. “I told him I was going off to do this film, and he said, ‘it’s a crime film, isn’t it?’ When he saw it he was like ‘Bryan…’ But I though if it worked, it would only be better for us, because if we can start to crack the genre, that can’t hurt us. I only worked about eight days on Two Hands. I just sat there playing scrabble and telling people to kill people, but with Barry you go on a ride through Sydney crime. He’s a far more active character. I loved playing both of them. I had a ball. They just feel right”

Dirty Deeds is fleshed out by a supporting cast of some of Australia’s finest actors, including Toni Collette (Sharon, Barry’s wife) and Sam Neil (Ray, a detective). In somewhat of a coup, John Goodman makes an appearance as mafia heavyweight Tony, and we’re introduced to new talent in the form of Sam Worthington (Darcy, Barry’s nephew) and Kestie Morassi (Margaret, Barry’s mistress). It’s a uniquely Australian film, both in its attitudes and it’s cultural relevance.

“The strength of the industry has to be telling Australian stories,” Brown affirms. “It might make business sense to some fuckwits to pretend we’re something else, but that’s never worked. If you take our best movies - Gallipoli or Breaker or Muriel’s Wedding or Shine or The Castle or Two Hands or Chopper – they’ve been steeped in this joint and the people from this joint. They all have a theme behind them. If you want to, Dirty Deeds is about cultural imperialism, but there’s a lot more humour than that.”