The Long Good Friday ***** (1980, Bob Hoskins, Helen Mirren, Dave King, Bryan Marshall, Derek Thompson) – Classic Movie Review 1220

Director John Mackenzie’s superb 1980 Brit classic is an exciting, trend-setting transfer of an American-style gangster movie to East London. It was voted number 21 in the British Film Institute’s top 100 British films of the 20th century.

It showcases Bob Hoskins’s career-best, star-making performance as Harold Shand, an old-fashioned London gangster aspiring to become a legitimate businessman, who finds himself in desperate trouble with a rival’s reprisals over an Easter weekend. When there’s a series of murders and exploding bombs from an unseen foe, Shand and his henchmen ruthlessly try to uncover his attackers’ identity. 

It was always going to be a winner with Barrie Keeffe’s expert, powerhouse screenplay, originally called The Paddy Factor, but with Hoskins’s star turn as well it’s unforgettable. Hoskins won the Evening Standard British Film Award for Best Actor. Helen Mirren stays in the memory too in a cool and commanding performance as his high-class gangster’s moll, Victoria.

In the now poignant plot, Harold Shand develops a plan to redevelop the then-disused London Docklands as a venue for a future Olympic Games, with the financial support of the American Mafia. So much for going straight! The ambitious, intelligent, thought-provoking plot deals with issues of the late Seventies it was written and filmed in, including low-level political and police corruption, IRA gun-running, property development, and even issues of EEC membership and the free-market economy.

It never gets bogged down in issues though. Remarkably exciting, fast-moving, violent and confident, it has enough real quality and power to stand comparison with the classic American gangster films of the Thirties and Forties such as The Public Enemy (1931) or White Heat (1949), on which it’s evidently modelled.

Pierce Brosnan appears as an IRA hitman in his first film role. Derek Thompson (TV’s Casualty) appears as Harold’s right-hand man Jeff. Paul Barber (Denzil in Only Fools and Horses and Horse from The Full Monty) plays police informant Erroll the Ponce. Dexter Fletcher is the boy who asks for money to watch Harold’s car. Dave King plays a bent copper called Parky and Bryan Marshall is the crooked councillor Harris.

Also in the cast are Eddie Constantine, George Coulouris, Paul Freeman, Stephen Davies, Brian Hall, P H Moriarty, Charles Cork, Patti Love, Ruby Head, Loe Dolan and Roy Alon.

It was made for British TV for £930,000, but before its planned ITV transmission the rights were bought from Lew Grade’s ITC Entertainment by George Harrison’s company Handmade Films for around £200,000 less than the production costs. They gave it a cinema release and it was a hit in the UK but not in America.

Sadly on 8 August 2012, Bob Hoskins announced his retirement from acting after being diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2011 and on 29 April 2014 he died from pneumonia, aged 71. Helen Mirren said ‘London will miss one of her best and most loving sons’.

In a 4o-year film career that runs right back to Up the Front in 1972, he memorably appeared in Mona Lisa (1986), Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), Mermaids (1990), Hook (1991), Super Mario Bros (1993), Nixon (1995), Mrs Henderson Presents (2005), Made in Dagenham (2010), Enemy at the Gates, Twenty Four Seven, Brazil, A Room for Romeo Brass and Snow White and the Huntsman (2012).

(C) Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Film Review 1220

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