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Bob Hoskins rules London - but for how long? - in classic Brit gangster masterpiece The Long Good Friday |
Director: John Mackenzie
Cast: Bob Hoskins (Harold Shand), Helen Mirren (Victoria),
Derek Thompson (Jeff), Bryan Marshall (Harris), PH Moriarty (Razors), Dave King
(Parky), Eddie Constantine (Charlie), Paul Freeman (Colin), Stephen Davies
(Tony), Paul Barber (Errol), Pierce Brosnan (Irishman)
The Long Good Friday
nearly turned into a one-hour TV special starring a dubbed Bob Hoskins. The
fact that it didn’t – and that today it can stand as one of the greatest
British films ever made – is thanks to George Harrison’s Handmade Films, which
bought the rights and saved the film. Thank God they did, as this is brilliant:
thrilling, dangerous, intense but witty, strangely tender, satirical and smart.
Fantastically made and wonderfully acted, it’s not just a great gangster film,
it’s a great film.
Harold Shand (Bob Hoskins) is the undisputed gangland boss
of London, desperate to turn legitimate. He has a plan for development of
London’s dockside into a paradise of office blocks and apartments. All he needs
is a big investor to support his “corporation” to make the final push. On an
Easter weekend he prepares to greet an American investor from a similar “company”
to his own. But as Shand prepares for this life-changing weekend, his business
is hit by a wave of killings and bombings that seem targeted at shattering his
organisation. What’s behind this? Who is “having a go”? And how does this link
with a mysterious money shipment we witnessed at the start of the film? Shand’s
going to find out – and has to do so without his investors getting cold feet.
The Long Good Friday
is a well-written, brilliantly structured mystery mixed with some brutal
gangland violence. Mackenzie’s film is lean and mean but laced with dry, biting
humour. Everything in the film works perfectly, and it really understands the
veneer of culture, class and decency that gangsters like Shand like to put over
their crime dealings.
Not that Shand isn’t a decent bloke of course. Bob Hoskins
is simply superb as Shand, a likeable, strangely decent guy at first, who seems
to somehow shrink and twist as the film progresses and he is less and less able
to control the anger he keeps bottled up. Shand clearly cares deeply for those
around him, but he’s also clearly stubborn and convinced of his own
superiority. Hoskins brings the part a humane gravitas, a force of nature fury
that burns through the film. And when confronted with opponents he can’t
understand, he still tries to use the rules of gangland to take them on.
Of course these rules are completely unsuited for his IRA
opponents. Despite the advice of his pet policeman Parky, Shand is confident
that he can deal with these bomb-toting fanatics. Even worse, he thinks that
they are basically playing by the same rules that powered his own rise to the
top of the gangster tree. Part of the tragedy of the part is seeing someone who
essentially appears relatively likeable at the start of the film fall back on
the violence and rage that powered his assent to the very top. Needless to say
the IRA aren’t intimidated by cockney thugs, and have no intention of letting
Shand get away with his attempts to strike back.
Here is a film brave enough to not only show the IRA at its
centre, but to make them as effective and ruthless as this. Not even our geezer
gangsters can take them on, and the poor plods seem petrified as soon as they
rear their head. Could there be a more cutting criticism of Britain’s policy in
Ireland? Terrorism has hardly gone away since – you imagine Shand being equally
outmatched by Al-Qaida.
As well as a gripping gangster film, The Long Good Friday is a prescient and intelligent criticism of
Thatcherism. Shand is actually pretty much spot-on with his vision of London
being redeveloped into a political and economic power-house, one of the major
cities of Europe. Many of the locations the film uses would be unrecognisible
today, as they are all sites of offices and apartments. Shand has a 1980s
swagger to him, a barrow-boy made good who likes to think of himself as a
visionary businessman. He’s desperate to grab for himself a bit of the new
money he senses could be washing around Thatcher’s Britain. So the film makes a
nice satire of the “loadsamoney” generation, as well as of the gangster world
of the East End. Shand’s yacht and flat are the quintessential yuppie pads, and
Shand’s motivation is raking the cash in.
British hubris actually seems to lie at the heart of the
whole film. Shand’s swagger and super-confident, “Britain reborn” attitudes are
all based in his firm belief that Britain has its own special destiny. Of
course, as events begin to hit home, this sense of British pride (represented
by Shand’s determination to reshape London into a city of glass and office
complexes) begins to shrivel under the weight of events. Shand is reduced to
angrily denouncing everyone from the Irish to his potential American partners
to the other nations of Europe.
(In fact it’s interesting watching the film in the light of
Brexit – Shand would on the surface seem to be the poster boy for a certain
type of UKIPer, but he’s actually passionately excited about the opportunities
the Union presents, and the centrality of London to that world. He’d almost
certainly loath Farage.)
All this thematic content – and this is a hugely British
film, instantly recognisable to anyone who has grown up here – gets swept up in
this brilliant gangster flick. The acting is sublime. Helen Mirren is a stand-out
as a woman who is a very equal partner in Shand’s business empire, just as smart
and just as ruthless. Derek Thompson (him off Casualty!) is good as a slightly sleazy major-domo, as is PH
Moriarty as a gangland heavy (he certainly looks the part!). Future stars like
Kevin McNally, Paul Freeman, Dexter Fletcher (as a kid) and most notably Pierce
Brosnan (in his first acting job as a handsome IRA hitman) fill out the cast.
Brilliantly acted, tightly directed and full of great
cultural and political depth, with terrific pace, scintillating action,
engrossing tension, a deceptively simple story and a great script: The Long Good Friday surely stands as a
landmark British film. And it has one of the finest final sequences you’ll see,
which considering it revolves solely around Hoskins sitting in a car is saying
something.
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