British cinema entered a dire and dolorous moment in the early 1970s as Hollywood money fled once the Swinging London days were done, and the remnants of the old local industry decayed and collapsed or relied on providing cheap production for Hollywood films. Several enterprising forces arose to counter the decline, most famously David Puttnam, who helped spark a revival by promoting flashy new directing talents like Ridley Scott and Alan Parker, and tackling projects with international appeal. Former Beatle George Harrison took a different approach, setting up Handmade Films to make modestly-budgeted but well-crafted fare engaged with present-tense realities in Britain. The Long Good Friday proved the ideal flagship for this sensibility. Despite carrying on a long tradition in British crime dramas and sustaining the raw sensibility many of the new stars and filmmakers who emerged in the 1960s tried to promote, The Long Good Friday still registered an aesthetic shock upon release with star Bob Hoskins’ unapologetically thick Cockney brogue and the general immersion in a brutal and streetwise synopsis of where Britain was at in the early days of Thatcherism.
It was fitting that The Long Good Friday exemplified the impression of a Britain re-emerging from a long winter as that is also, in part, the film’s subject, albeit making a foray into a grand new age of shark-like yuppie capitalism and internationalism only to contend with the lingering ghosts of old blunders and hypocrisies with an unwillingness to truly make account of them. Hoskins’ character Harold Shand is in this regard both a character and also a carefully contrived emblem of an age and a way of thinking and feeling. A gangster who’s trying to make the last leap into legitimate tycoon status by overseeing the redevelopment of disused Thames dockyards for an Olympics bid, Harold has maintained a general peace amongst the many, nefarious players in the London underworld through a blend of generosity and ruthless enforcement, having killed off his most virile opponents years ago and maintained a relatively clean image through avoiding the drug trade.
Ensconced in his flash yacht moored at the docks, Harold is hosting mafia honcho Charlie (Eddie Constantine) in the hope he’ll invest in the project, with his well-bred wife Victoria (Helen Mirren) operating as dextrous impresario of sociability, whilst pet London councillor Harris (Bryan Marshall) facilitates the deal with political sway and generosity with information. But Harold’s plans go awry as a series of attacks rock his operation, including the assassination of his old confederate Colin (Paul Freeman), and bombings that kill his driver and destroy a pub he owns. After carving a path of intimidation through all the known quantities of his milieu but failing to identify just who has such a potent grudge against him and the muscle to mount such an assault, Harold eventually learns he’s being targeted by the IRA because of a misbegotten deal arranged his smooth and educated lieutenant Jeff (Derek Thompson) on the behalf of Harris, delivering funds to the organisation in order to maintain a stream of cheap Irish labour for their building projects.
The script by Barrie Keefe, more usually a playwright, nimbly tackles a storyline that perfectly describes the moment of the movie’s making but also has a classical resonance: at points the story resembles Shakespeare’s King Lear and Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death in depicting a lord ensconced on a throne of blood shocked when the gravity of mortality descends and learns fate can’t be bucked. Harold’s journey through the sphere he nominally rules sees him confronted by a rapidly changing social landscape, the old working class neighbourhood he returns to in search of answers now filled with immigrants and budding young ruffians with a different sense of style but still recognisable to Harold in their cunning and ruthlessness. Harold rummages through the lesser liege lords of the underworld in fruitlessly brutal hunt for his persecutors, getting his lieutenants to haul them hanging upside down like meat carcasses in a meat plant. Harold’s pet bent cop, Parky (Dave King), gives up the name of his best informant at the promise of a share in the dockland deal, but has to pay the piper when he informs Harold about what he’s up against, getting a slap in the face from his aggrieved master.
The Long Good Friday’s director John Mackenzie was mostly an earthy, rigorous stylist in the staunch British realist mode, who early in his career worked as an assistant director under Ken Loach. His feature debut Unman, Wittering and Zigo (1971) proved an eerie mystery-thriller with an intriguingly similar underlying thesis in studying an assailed authority figure dogged by menacing, ambiguous foes, and similarly describing the failure of an institutional sense of Britain, this time articulated through a snotty boys’ boarding school, before an oncoming wave of barbarian influence. The Long Good Friday is certainly his best-known film, and some of the more prestigious fare he was hired for in its wake, like his version of Graham Greene’s The Honorary Consul (1983) and the solid Frederick Forsyth adaptation The Fourth Protocol (1987), failed to earn much enthusiasm. Mackenzie still turned in some very strong work, like his second film for Handmade, A Sense of Freedom (1981), an even grimmer and punishing portrayal of gangland squalor and resistance of power, and the compelling telemovie Deadly Voyage (1996) about the exploitation and murder of illegal immigrants, an even more timely theme now.
Mackenzie’s stark yet sleek edge was best suited to something like The Long Good Friday, expertly overcoming the stringent budget through a pungent sense of the then-contemporary London landscape, islands of tony respectability, migrant ghettoes, and post-industrial tundra alike all viewed with equanimity as part of a new Britain on the make, much as Harold himself views it, his street wit better equipped to grasp its new dimensions than any number of jet-set toffs even as he seeks to join their ranks. The looming force of gentrification is about to remake the gritty urban world that seemed so desperate and yet felt so comfortable to the weary post-war west and which underpinned so much filmmaking and music in the ‘70s. The early scenes are unusual in offering a succession of vignettes that make little initial sense even as they sketch scenes of violence and duplicity that eventually gain import. Glimpses of Colin pilfering cash from the load he carries in a suitcase and flirting with a young man in a bar are intercut with some men counting the money in a countryside house only to be attacked by gun-wielding intruders. A coffin arrives on a train and is transported through the London streets, an aggrieved woman in black halting the procession long enough to get out and spit in Jeff’s face when she sees him lunching with Harris.
Harold’s proper entrance into the film sees him delivered out of the belly of that emblem of super-modernity and tycoon swagger circa 1980, the Concorde, to stride through the airport, imbued with an aura of potency as well as still, in the fast, searching darts of his eyes, still betraying a hardened survivor’s awareness. His arrival imbues shape upon proceedings. Mackenzie mines mordant visual and thematic symmetry as Harold surveys the captive hoods his men collect, dangling like the meat carcasses around them. Much later in the film Mackenzie offers a shot of Harold gazing out of his yacht’s window as Jeff pulls up in a car on the dock, reflected in the glass, deftly generating both an air of menace and framing Harold as a man caught within the trap of deceptive surfaces that is blinding egotism and deceitful underlings. The Long Good Friday made stars of Hoskins and Mirren, who here offer a perfectly matched sweet-and-sour double act, the bristling plebeian fist and the aristocratic glove united as a cunning front. Hoskins’ incarnation of bullish ferocity scarcely contained by affectations of bonhomie and entrepreneurial vision is still the obvious stuff of movie legend. Hoskins describes Harold’s many dimensions, delivering empathy in his flashes of shame and fear and grief roiling before the berserker takes over and his eyes turned glazed and scary, and the monstrous acts he has and will countenance become apparent.
The Long Good Friday allows flashes of understanding, even admiration, for Harold, as he grieves his friend Colin and faces crushing blows with strident determination covering queasy anxiety, and noting the complexities of his character, his complete lack of homophobia, his distaste for drugs, and his sharp swings from using racist epithets to contemplative sympathy for the new communities facing old problems. And yet the film manages to avoid sentimentalising him, depicting his readiness to leap to violent solutions to problems as the trait that made him but also proves his undoing, reaching an apogee when he loses his temper with Jeff and stabs him to death with a broken scotch bottle. Mackenzie displays a level of cunning with visual context in conflating Harold’s ambitious climbing with the landscape of 1980 London. His and Victoria’s glad-handing with Charlie and his lawyer Tony (Stephen Davies) is filmed with the Tower Bridge in the background, in the manner of many a movie made around the period that wrung groans from British viewers in recognising such shots as service for international audience, before the yacht sails towards the disused zones of the dockland where grubbier business is discussed and ominous storm clouds hover. His mission of retaliation leads him from his posh apartment to grubby terraces and offal-caked freezer rooms.
Harold’s angry, wilfully parochial mission of reclamation predicts the Brexit moment by three decades, although the upshot of his flailing efforts sees him finally and contemptuously turning from hesitant American investors to pursue the potential European embrace, delivering a scorching tirade to Charlie deriding the new Mafia’s lack of balls and celebrating “a touch of the Dunkirk spirit,” a moment of proud fury for the antihero that’s quickly and ruthlessly undercut. The film is peppered with jolts of gamy and intimate violence, reaching a baroque apotheosis when a young woman finds her security guard father nailed in cruciform to a warehouse floor by the IRA hoods who have stolen some explosives, put to good use in their bombings. Colin is stabbed in the seedy change rooms of a public pool by one of the hoods (a baby-faced Pierce Brosnan in his film debut), his blood coating tiled steps when Harold arrives to survey the scene only to be washed away with the false promise that all such crimes can be quickly hidden.
This motif is repeated in a more ritualistic fashion, when Harold showers away Jeff’s blood, like a priest of some ancient cult who knows he’s done grim business in offering up blood sacrifice but now thinks he’s bought new life from the gods. Less deadly but just as cruel is the scene where Harold has his number one hood Razors (P.H. Moriarty) slash the legs of Parky’s hapless grass, the pimp Errol (Paul Barber), in trying to learn what Errol knows about the attacks: Harold has Razors show off his own scars from such a session and mentions his other nickname, “The Human Spyrograph,” in a show of vicious and punitive use of force that ultimately proves fruitless, like most of Harold’s efforts at taking action. Most fatefully, Harold fails to heed Jeff’s warning that the can’t react to the IRA like a rival mob, as it’s an organisation composed of dedicated fanatics capable of waging long-game campaigns and with foot soldiers who can keep operating without their bosses, something Harold intrinsically can’t comprehend.
Francis Monkman’s score is a vital component in forging the film’s texture, particularly Harold’s main theme, blending urbane jazzy strut and nerve-jangling electronica, resurging at the climax to particularly mordant effect. Once he finally knows who he’s up against, Harold arranges a meeting with an IRA honcho, who proves, in another witty and flavourful touch, to be a stock car racer. Harold makes a show of paying the organisation off before his goons burst in and blast the Irishmen, blowing the out through an office window to spark havoc on the racetrack, Harold’s theatre of revenge enacted on a most satisfyingly pyrotechnic scale. And yet the brilliant, queasily sardonic punchline sees all Harold’s pretences mocked as he unwittingly climbs into his car only to realise it’s been commandeered by the IRA hoods. He glimpses Victoria’s screaming face in another car, a rather horror movie-like touch. Brosnan’s smirk as he holds a gun on Harold counters Hoskins’ swift passage through a hundred shaded variations of rage, fear, rueing, and resignation as he’s chauffeured off to doom: it’s one of the most perfect final shots in cinema.
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