The immortalisation of Dublin gangster Martin Cahill on celluloid continues. Vicious Circle, the BBC's feature-length drama showing in a primetime slot next week, is the second in the cycle, following John Boorman's The General and preceding Thaddeus O'Sullivan's Ordinary Decent Criminal, which is currently in post-production. Of the three films, Vicious Circle, as a relatively small-scale television piece, is the most low-key, but it's a fascinating piece of work, and not just because of its basis in fact.
Producer Sue Austen is keen to emphasise the differences between Vicious Circle and the other two Cahill films. "Ours isn't just the Martin Cahill story. It's a story about a Dublin gangster coming up against an IRA character and a policeman character, both of whom we've invented, and the three of them constantly circling each other. It doesn't deal with any of the events of his earlier life. We start at the time of the O'Connor's raid, and go straight down the line with an exciting piece of drama. We've compressed the events, going through the whole Kilakee episode, up to his death and our other characters' reaction to it."
This time, Cahill is played by Scottish actor Ken Stott, who came to the story with no preconceptions. "I knew nothing about him apart from the fact that he was a Dublin gangster. The fact is that the man was a very enigmatic character. Everywhere I go, I meet people who know something about him, or knew him, or else say they knew him. And there are so many conflicting stories about him."
Filmed on a comparatively low budget over a tight, five-week schedule, Vicious Circle is firmly in the tradition of gritty, television thrillers, acknowledges director David Blair, whose other credits include Jimmy McGovern's The Lakes. "I wanted to use locations that were hard and grimy and industrial," he says. "So we ended up shooting a lot of material around the docklands and port area of the city." Blair's energetic shooting style is in contrast with Boorman's elegiac black-and-white imagery in The General, and the Dublin of Vicious Circle - dirty, noisy, jammed with traffic - will probably look more familiar to an Irish audience.
Just as The General touched on the actual story with Des O'Malley's reprise of his Dail speech about Cahill, the BBC's film has its own connection to real events, with RTE reporter Brendan O'Brien, who followed Cahill's career for many years and door-stepped him for Today Tonight, playing himself interviewing the gangster - the very interview, incidentally which led to O'Malley's speech. It's just one of many ways in which, despite the protestations of the film-makers, the different Cahill films will be measured against each other.
Of course, Stott's version of Cahill will inevitably be compared with Brendan Gleeson's (and with Kevin Spacey's more fictionalised character in Ordinary Decent Criminal, when we see it later this year). While Vicious Circle doesn't focus quite so exclusively on the gangster - the fictional detective (Andrew Connolly) is on screen almost as much as Stott, and John Kavanagh, as the shadowy, manipulative IRA leader, also figures strongly - Cahill is still the fulcrum of the story. In Stott's interpretation, Cahill is a less genial, more opaque figure, although just as stubborn and prone to violence. The "crucifixion" scene, in which an accomplice suspected of stealing from the gang is nailed to the floor, is, if anything, more shocking than in The General, while the domestic scenes are more downbeat.
"The interesting part of playing a villain is to find the softer and more gentle aspects of the character, not that they abound in this script but there are areas in which you can feel some sympathy towards him," says Stott. "You do stop yourself and say wait, hold on, why is this happening. But if you look at Cahill's childhood it's very clear that it was terrible . . . It was obvious that he was going to have a lifetime of kicking back against the authorities, and he did so spectacularly."
"He isn't glamourised but he is the central character," says Austen. "It's a relatively difficult line to draw. There are some situations where he is represented sympathetically, particularly with his children, and the different women with whom he had relationships. That lulls you into a sense of security, but then he will do something brutal and nasty to somebody else."
While the Garda don't quite come across as the buffoons depicted in The General, there's certainly an element of Keystone Kops about some of their blundering. Andrew Connolly, one of Ireland's best screen actors, plays Finney, the detective driven by an obsession to put Cahill in prison. "Finney doesn't have any respect for Cahill," says Connolly. "His own personal life is a mess, and he only has one objective, to get this guy behind bars."
As written by Ballykissangel creator Kieran Prendiville, Vicious Circle is firmly in the tradition of the police procedural - the tortured, lonely cop tormented by his cunning adversary is a familiar figure in thrillers (although the script is at its weakest when veering into Connolly's marital problems and venturing some improbable coincidences). Austen acknowledges the attractions of the raw material for genre filmmaking. "There's a long tradition of making those kinds of films in America. For us, it's a chance to make a modern, fast-paced action thriller. The reason people are attracted to the story is that there probably aren't a lot of subjects where you can give it that kind of treatment."
Vicious Circle is on BBC 1 at 10 p.m. on Tuesday