The Long Good Friday Agreement

The Long Good Friday (John Mackenzie, 1980)

There comes a time when the stars align and a film comes along that both appeases chin-stroking film snobs and bottom-rung trash degenerates, like yours truly. John Mackenzie's British gangster thriller, The Long Good Friday is one of those films. Much like selected works from Jean Pierre Melville's filmography, what's noticeable The Long Good Friday is how it's cut from the same cloth as traditional gangster film. However, instead of playing out as an often imitable pastiche of skullduggery and turf wars, Barrie Keefe's writing treatment takes it to a unique level of pitting the film's gangboss against a mysterious assailant wreaking havoc upon his criminal empire.

Although working in TV prior to this, The Long Good Friday was Bob Hoskins' first real breakthrough into film as the hilariously named mob boss Harold Shand. Despite being a short and stocky type of fella, Hoskins completely fills up the screen with his commanding presence. Often appearing like a giant in the foreground, much like his character's status. As a genre movie head, there must have been some kind of karmic equilibrium that occured during that time, since Bob Hoskins was the most swarthy Englisman I ever laid eyes upon. This observation is remarkably counterbalanced by the waspy appearance of Italian horror star, Pierluigi Conti, aka Al Cliver. Throughout the The Long Good Friday's running time, the viewer is presented with Shand's rulership and his determination to expand into an ambitious commercial. Credit goes mostly to Hoskins' performance of course as he could have easily been reduced to the typical gangster lazily exemplified in the past couple of decades of Brit gangtser flicks. Shand is multilayered.

There's a complexity to the character that many imitators fail to replicate. A dangerous individual that could reach nought to sixty at the drop of a hat.Woe betide anyone who crosses a violent mob boss like Shand, however, his dialogue and Hoskins exceptional delivery is incredibly funny at times. Take his brief mourning for his old mate and business associate, Colin, found murdered at the local pool with his corpse having to be discretely snuck out of the vicinity via an ice cream van; Hoskins delivers a pearler of a line with, "there's a lot of dignity in that, isn't there? Going out like a raspberry ripple." This humourous level of catharticism runs rampant throughout the film. There's also his extreme level of self and national pride  which drive both his entrepreneurial accumen and the darkest aspects in his character, e.g, his obvious racism. That's a tough act to achieve in hindsight; all the more outstanding when you take into account Hoskins is so compelling to watch on screen (with the exception of his shower scene). It's almost as if he was borne from Scorsese's repertoire of loathsome yet mesmerising characters. Shand is essentially a contradiction in his beliefs: on the one hand, he exhibits interests in the commerical and cultural progression of his beloved London, to the point he sees it as the eventual epicentre of Europe and the prospective host of the 1988 Olympic Games (unlucky, H!); while on the other hand, his ignoramus attitude and over inflated self-pride further positions himself and his inner circle in obvious peril.

Helen Mirren plays Shand's posh, Benenden-educated, gangster moll, Victoria; apparently it was Mirren who changed her from hoodrat to upmarket sort. Her character was also upgraded to be a bit smarter than originally intended, but in all honesty, other than some fancy talking to Shand's prospective business/mob partners from the U.S, one of whom played by Alphaville's Eddie Constantine, she seems to be about as intelligent as your run-of-the-mill Tipping Point contestant. The rest of the cast is a rogues gallery of familiar faces from British TV which include: Derek Thompson, better known as Charlie from Casualty, as Shand's lieutenant Jeff; mean muggin' Razors, otherwise known as "Clapham Junction", played by P.H. Moriarty; Paul Barber, aka Denzil from Only Fools And Horses, as Errol the Ponce getting slashed across the arse cheeks; Range Rover enthusiast, Gillian Taylforth, more commonly recognised as Kathy "I'm dirty, Paulie! I'm dirty!" Beale from Eastenders; and a brief appearance by Dexter Fletcher as a guttersnype kid before he grew up and committed crimes against humanity with his American accent in the show Press Gang. However, perhaps the biggest name other than Hoskins and Mirren, is Pierce Brosnan as an I.R.A. hitman, in an apperance that even predates that one episode he got offscreen killed by a female serial killer in an episode of Hammer House of Horror.

Somewhat curious as to what would have happened to Shand if he didn't doublecross the I.R.A leader, Captain Death in the cabin at the stock car racing circuit (that place is a Sainsbury's now). On the real, Shand was a dead man walking and I hardly think handing over a case of £60K would have saved his skin from the I.R.A. Think he would have been full anti-E.U and harping on about Brexit if they left him alive, though. I do find it fascinating, however, of pitting a ruthless business man like Shand against a political organisation like the I.R.A; in this respect, it reminds me of Michael Corleone's reluctance to invest in Havana, Cuba prior to Castro's revolution in Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather: Part II (1974).

Mackenzie's film runs just under two hours long and it's very efficient with its pacing; not lingering constantly to milk any dramatic effect to the point of ridicule. Set in a twenty-four hour period, the film takes the viewer on a non-stop adventure into Shand's world of organised crime, while he begins to process who his destructive foes are and how he intends to deal with them. Bouncing from one location to another, we're privileged to see the inner sanctum of Harold Shand's empire collapsing within a small amount of time. Importantly, what The Long Good Friday has in its favour is it's all carried out via necessity and not as an exercise of style over substance like say Guy Richie's mockney gangster movies. Aside from Hoskin's powerhouse performance, this is primarily the reason why Mackenzie's film is in such a higher league than the Britwave of gangster movies that emerged during the late nineties and into the noughties, although Jonathan Glazer's Sexy Beast (2000) is a legitimate favourite of mine.

The Long Good Friday (Harold Shand's speech to the mafia scene)

(John Mackenzie, 1980)

 

  

Goes without saying that Francis Monkman's killer synth work and unforgetable saxophone riff for the film's main theme is incredible; it probably explains why the mulleted Pat Sharp played the theme ad nauseam as his background track whenever he spewed inane promotional garbage during his tenure as DJ over at Capital FM back in the eighties. The biggest oddity is a reggae number called Talking to the Police, sung by a Bob Hoskins. Apart from Hoskins' cod-reggae vocals, its use in the film is particularly noteworthy, as it's playing when he rolls into a Brixton street looking for the snitch Errol the Ponce, while berating the local youths with casual racism.

Really can't end this review without discussing the obvious ending. If you haven't seen this film that's well over forty years old, it's too late to be worried about spoilers, son. Shand's abduction is perhaps one of those ending that elevates what's otherwise a great film to stratospheric levels. We're privvy to a range of different emotions as Hoskins puts his acting prowess to good measure. His conveyance of all that he's feeling without uttering a single world during those final moments, all while Pierce Brosnan has him held at gunpoint, is truly sublime. At the risk of sounding clichéd, Hoskins' performance truly is a masterclass in acting. Fun fact: Hoskins and Brosnan were never filmed together for that actual scene.

 

The Long Good Friday (Taken scene)

(John Mackenzie, 1980)

 

 

True Story: 

Bob Hoskins once attended an open evening event held at my old school. He claimed to have been a student there, despite the school having a different name at the time and it being situated in a totally different location. Sounds like a completely different school to me, Bob. However, considering the only famous people to have attended that horrible dump masquerading as an educational institution were scatterbrained, political pundit Robert Peston, that bird who sang It Feels So Good and grime artist Chipmunk, he would have defintitely gotten the seal of approval from me.