Day 26: The Long Good Friday (1979)
“The Long Good Friday,” starring the great Bob Hoskins and Academy award winner Dame Helen Mirren, is a film that both redefined and resurrected the British gangster film. With its tense pace and astonishing performances, we have a contemporary mob movie that treats it’s gangsters as men of peace and business, who, after setting up a calm London, now find themselves victims of violence they didn’t ask for. In this way, the gangsters are the good guys, the lesser evil, who are united with the law enforcement in an attempt to keep the peaceful (although crooked) status-quo.
In the film, Hoskins plays Harold Shand, the big man in London, who, for a decade, has kept the citizens of the city safe from gang wars and the different criminal factions happy and at bay. Everyone is on the take and, because of this, everyone prospers. Things are going so well, in fact, that Harold aspires to become a legitimate businessman, albeit with the financial backing of the American Mafia, by instigating a plan to turn London’s deserted docklands into an arena for the 1988 Olympic Games- bringing in a load of cash and a ton of jobs for the impoverished surrounding area.
But someone doesn’t like the level of Harold’s power and suddenly the London underworld and Harold’s life is ripped apart by the bombing of one of his pubs and the murder of two of his closest friends. Things have become personal and, if Harold plans to give London the future it deserves, he must hold his crew together, gain the respect of the American mafia, and find the dirty rats who plan to ruin him.
What sets “The Long Good Friday” apart from its other mob film brothers is just how distinct and in contrast Hoskins’ Harold Shand is to other crime bosses of the cinema screen. While the likes of Tony Montana in “Scarface,” are thugs with a temper and too much power, Harold has risen from the bottom and matured into a business man, seeking peace through crime opposed to further opposition. He is past the point where he must prove himself and, in many ways, is a very stable gentleman. He doesn’t believe in using drugs to put money in his pockets and he cares for his community and employees. In fact, he only resorts to the tough guy shtick when he has been pushed first and, when he does lose control, he is ashamed of himself.
In one particular scene, after a whole day of searching for his friend’s murderers and coming up empty, Harold is furious and, at one point, shoves his wife Victoria (Mirren) onto their living room couch. Seeing what he has done to his now crying wife, he crumples to the couch and in bewilderment asks himself, “What’s happening to me?” And that’s the thing that makes him such a compelling character. Harold wants to be a better man, even while being a criminal, and it is these two conflicting ideals, which mix about as well as oil and water, that give Harold the trouble he now faces. For he wants to be the King of London not it’s dictator- to be a man of the brain and not of the fist.
“The Long Good Friday,” directed by John Mackenzie and written by Barrie Keeffe, is a gangster film that, at its core, is a character study of a man who wants to rise above the expectations of his calling and be become something more- something legitimate in his illegitimate world. It is because of this that the film is one of the best of its genre and also a key player in revitalizing the England based gangster story.
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