41) The Long Good Friday

The Long Good Friday (1980)

Director: John Mackenzie

Starring: Bob Hoskins, Helen Mirren, Derek Thompson, P.H. Moriarty, Paul Freeman, Bryan Marshall, Pierce Brosnan

The Long Good Friday first came onto my radar a few years ago when it was mentioned a few times in some readings I was doing for a topic on the gangster film. I had been interested to see it but had been unable to find it on DVD anywhere. However during January when I went down the coast for a holiday I stuck my head into Video Ezy at Ulladulla, because I've often found they have some interesting things for sale and lo and behold there it was on the sale table for about $10 so I grabbed it.

It is Good Friday and powerful underworld boss Harold Shand (Hoskins) is close to sealing a crucial deal with an American crime organisation. Harold and his wife Victoria (Mirren) are entertaining Charlie (Constantine), a representative of the American organisation in London to finalise the deal, when without warning Harold's empire comes under attack. Two of his henchmen are killed, his mother is almost blown up in a car bomb and a pub he was minutes away from entering is blown up. If Harold wants to save this very lucrative deal, he has to work out where this trouble is coming from and deal with it quickly.

For most of us, when we think gangster movies we think American and there's a good reason for this. America has produced some amazing gangster pictures Little Caesar, The Public Enemy, Scarface: The Shame of a Nation and the De Palma remake Scarface, Goodfellas, Reservoir Dogs and, of course, the epic Godfather trilogy. However, Britain also has a wonderful gangster film tradition having produced films like Get Carter, Brighton Rock, Sexy Beast and Guy Ritchie's trio of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Snatch and Rock 'n' Rolla. The Long Good Friday is among the very best examples of the British style of gangster movie.

British gangster movies tend to be quite different to American gangster movies in terms of their tone. With the exception of a few like The Departed and Miller's Crossing which focus on Irish gangsters, most American gangster films deal with the Italian Mafia. This has lead to the romanticising of gangsters in American film. Gangsters are seen to be stylish, influential, glamorous people, typified by Marlon Brando's Don Corleone in The Godfather. British gangster films, on the other hand, promote a much earthier, grittier view of the gangster. The British gangster tends to be more aligned to the working class, cockney 'geezer'. Rather than the glamorous portrayal we see in American films where Mafioso are almost seen like royalty, British gangsters are shown to be more small time crooks, and even when they become wealthy and powerful, the essence of the character remains the same. The grittier tone of the British gangster film in comparison with the American is actually alluded to in The Long Good Friday in a scene towards the end of the film where Harold confronts the Americans who have been scared out of making the deal with him by all the violence, accusing them of being soft, of having this great reputation but not having the toughness to handle the way things work in Britain, ending dismissively with "The Mafia? I've shit 'em."

The cast in this film is a real treat, especially for younger viewers who are only used to seeing some of these actors in their older age. Bob Hoskins is fantastic as the fearsome, ruthless Harold. The Long Good Friday was really the film which put Bob Hoskins on the map, establishing his character as the tough little bastard. It was released in the USA in 1982 and not long after that he was hired to play gangster Owney Madden in Francis Ford Coppola's The Cotton Club. From there Hoskins would go on to appear in either leading or key supporting roles in notable American films such as Brazil, Mona Lisa, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Mermaids, Hook, Nixon and of course Super Mario Bros. Helen Mirren does a wonderful job of balancing sexy and strong with her performance as Victoria. There are also smaller performances from some familiar faces like Paul Freeman, best known for his role as Belloq in Raiders of the Lost Ark, and a very young, almost boyish looking Pierce Brosnan.

The one complaint I do have about this film, which is more a sign of the times than a unique criticism of this film, is that the score dates the film quite horribly. The Long Good Friday has a synthesiser driven score which instantly places the film in the early 1980s. Orchestral scores don't date films the way pop music or non-orchestral scores do.

The Long Good Friday is a really good film. It is a whodunnit disguised in the clothes of a gangster film, and this combination works. At times some of the violence is a bit confronting, so it is not one for the feint hearted, but if you are a fan of the gangster genre it is not to be missed.