The boys are back in town.
Crime boss Thomas Shelby and his crew are back in action as “Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man,” a hotly anticipated sequel to the wildly popular 2013 gangster series, debuts on Netflix on March 20.
The almost 2-hour film, which was in select theaters before dropping on the streaming service, resumes the story of wolf-eyed war veteran-turned-Birmingham crime boss Shelby, played by Oscar-winner Cillian Murphy.
The original series, set in England in the wake of World War I, ran for six seasons and followed Shelby and his family through tragedy and triumph, ending on a cliffhanger in 2022 when Shelby survived a failed assassination.
“It’s the Second World War, so [Tommy Shelby] is facing the Nazis, the enemy at the time in the 1940s,” screenwriter Steven Knight told The Post about the new film’s plot.
While both the show and movie are fictional, Knight drew inspiration for the Shelby clan from second-hand stories of the real-life Peaky Blinders, an elegantly dressed but terribly behaved band of British criminals.
The seeds of Knight’s story were sewn from his father’s childhood memory of delivering a message to a group of beautifully groomed gangsters, each with a peaked cap and gun in pocket, seated around a table piled with cash.
“That image — smoke, booze, and these immaculately dressed men in this slum in Birmingham — that’s the mythology, that’s the story, and that’s the first image I started to work with,” Knight recalled to History Extra.
The OG Peaky Blinders were active in Birmingham in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a period of rapid urbanization that coincided with rampant unemployment and widespread poverty.
As the adage maintains, people get hungry, and they get mean, and the conditions gave rise to a violent criminal underbelly.
Comprised of working-class men in their teens and early 20s, the Peaky Blinders were equal parts dapper and dangerous.
The hit series immortalized the most persistent myth about the gang: that their name came from sewing razor blades into their caps and using them to slice or blind their enemies.
However, experts maintain that bit of sartorial sadism is likely an invention.
“Razor blades were only beginning to come in from the 1890s and were a luxury item, much too expensive for the Peaky Blinders to have used,” Birmingham historian Carl Chinn told the Birmingham Mail. “It would be very difficult to get direction and power with a razor blade sewn into the soft part of a cap.”
More than likely, the moniker came from the way the peaked caps, known colloquially as peakys, were worn by the young thugs; tilted over one eye, presumably to obscure their faces and avoid being identified by their victims.
Meanwhile, the term ‘blinder’ was a popular description for someone with a dazzling appearance.
In kind and built to blind in a metaphorical sense, the original Peaky Blinders outfitted themselves in cravats, bell-bottom trousers, steel-capped boots, tailored jackets, and silk scarves, suggesting something of a degenerate-dandy aesthetic that’s replicated in the show.
Scholars maintain this luxe uniform served a triple-threat agenda: it distinguished the Peaky Blinders from other gangs, grandly demonstrated wealth and status, and served as a middle finger to the police, who could easily identify gang members but were powerless to stop them.
Leveraging fear and bribery, the gang exerted tremendous economic, political, and social control over the city.
The show portrays the gang as working-class anti-heroes committed to improving the lives of the downtrodden, a point of moral distortion according to Chinn.
“Really, they preyed upon their own,” he wrote in “Peaky Blinders: The Real Story.”
Historian David Cross told BBC News the Peaky Blinders were indiscriminate in their attacks, targeting “anybody who looked vulnerable” with a mercenary attitude.
“Anything that could be taken, they would take it,” he said.
Following an attack on a man named George Eastwood (allegedly provoked by Eastwood ordering a ginger beer in a pub) in 1890, a local newspaper coined the term Peaky Blinders – the first time the name appeared in print.
Over time, the gang’s criminal enterprise expanded from gambling, pickpocketing, extortion, and assault to high-profile and high-dollar pursuits like smuggling, fraud, and hijacking.
The real Peakys peaked, so to speak, before the onset of World War I, a timeline inverted in the show, which follows the crime family from 1919 onward.
In the end, it would not be the authorities but a rival gang that put an end to the sordid and stylish reign of the Peaky Blinders. And while the Blinders eventually lost their hold on Birmingham, they remain an enduring source of fashion, fascination, and fear.
Indeed, “The Immortal Man” won’t be the end of the “Peaky Blinders” saga.
“There is such a voracious appetite for the Peaky world,” Knight previously told The Post. “We will continue to tell that story, as long as there is a story to tell.”
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