British Gangsters: The Long Good Friday (Dir John Mackenzie, 1h54m, 1980)

In 2024, Empire Magazine named The Long Good Friday the greatest British Gangster film of all time. Brighton Rock came seventh, Get Carter second. Much like Get Carter, The Long Good Friday has long been imitated by lesser films, countless would-be hard men beholden to the film's depiction of the gangster, Harold Shand (the late great Bob Hoskins) heading a criminal empire at the beginning of the very early 1980s in London, as his attempts to consolidate power with the help of the American Mafia and to legitimise his business, come under threat from enemies within and without, as the city threatens to fall into open gang warfare.

Once again, we return to the London of the 1960s and 1970s: Barrie Keeffe, a journalist by trade for the now defunct The Stratford Express, begins his literary career. His first novel is published in 1969, his first script for television in 1972, and his first script for the stage in 1973; Keefee eventually leaves journalism to take up being a full-time dramatist in 1975. The Long Good Friday is, at least partly, drawn from his surroundings and experiences; Shand is partly based on the Kray twins. The redevelopment of the derelict Docklands visible from Keeffe's highrise flat. The film's political undercurrent, its focus on the corruption of the police and local government by Shand also reflects stories he had covered as a reporter.

Keeffe's script will be directed by John Mackenzie, most notable for being Ken Loach's assistant director on the seminal tv film, Up the Junction (1965), and directing several television films, most notably 7:84's The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil (1974). However, the film's journey to screen is a complex one, with several production companies involved, including Lew Grade's Associated Television, who will screen the film. Grade is unhappy with the film's level of violence and supposed glamourisation of the IRA. Grade threatens to cut the film down to a mere seventy minutes, Producer Barry Hanson attempts to buy back the film before it could be aired, with the financial backing of Handmade Films, partly owned by George Harrison, buying the film and releasing it uncut in cinemas. 

Harold Shand (Bob Hoskins) is at the heart of The Long Good Friday, in a nuanced portrait of power.

Harold Shand first appears ten minutes into The Long Good Friday: by this point, the plot is in motion, gunmen-later to be revealled as the IRA-have already dispatched some of Shand's men in Northern Ireland, and soon, Shand's right hand man, Colin (Paul Freeman) will also be stabbed to death in brutal circumstances. Yet, Shand's arrival, to the quintessentially 1980s main theme for the film, all blaring synth trumpets and keyboards, courtesy of Francis Monkman, is like nothing we've seen in this season so far: it is not only triumphant but ostenaceous, a display of British gangster opulence to rival 1983's Scarface, arriving from Concorde, to climb into a Rolls Royce, to arrive at his yacht, with his second in command, Jeff (Derek Thompson). 

Shand has returned to his extensive criminal empire in order to go into legitimate business with the Mafia, who soon arrive in the form of Eddie Constantine (beloved of the French and German filmgoing public)'s hardnosed mafioso, Charlie, who plans to go into business with Shand. Here, Keffee's script captures the trend of the decade of growing police-and indeed, government, corruption-not only is the small welcoming party that Shand throws for Charlie and his lawyer, (an enjoyably icy Stephen Davies) attended by many of the gangster's underlings, but also by the police that he has in his pocket, led by Parky (Dave King) and by members of the local council, including Councillor Harris (Bryan Marshall) who has aided the expansion of Shand's business empire through his own greed and corruption. However, with the deaths of Colin, his driver Phil in a bomb attack, and with his businesses coming under further attacks, so Shand begins to realise that his business empire and his attempts to court the Americans, are now at threat.

Shand is another of the great gangster performances; Hoskins portrays him with a Napoleonic short man fury-almost every one of his underlings tower over him, a man atop greatness suddenly seeing the fall come into view. Harold is tough-we see him and henchman Razors (P. H. Moriarty, later to cameo in Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels) attack Erroll "the ponce" (Paul Barber) with a knife in an uncomfortable scene of quasi-torture, we see him mastermind the gathering together of most of his enemies in an attempt to weed out the traitor in a queasily shot sequence (cinematographer, Phil Méheux, would later work on Goldeneye) in a slaughterhouse in which his adversaries-and the camera- are suspended upside down from the ceiling.

The Long Good Friday's depiction of violence is an undercurrent to Harold's control of London, as it slowly unravels

Yet, whilst there is a underlying brutality to Shand, a temper that seems, at any moment, like it may-and indeed, does, with tragic results-explode, there is also something deeply flawed about him; he fatally underestimates his opponents, and Shand, as his enemies close in, is left floundering. Hoskins draws upon his years in rep to give Shand an almost Shakespearean sense, a man whose control of what feels like the entire city of London is slipping away, leading to perhaps the single best performance of Hoskins' career at the film's denoument.

His version of masculinity is a far cry from Jack Carter, but he is still a gangster, and for all his attempts to go "straight", he is an altogether more complex figure, full of contradictions: His relation to race is one of them; his version of Little Englander launches into an evocation, a defense, of the country as he and his henchmen and the Americans, sail down the Thames, a sense of "There'll always be a a England", this unsavoury undertone further reappearing when confronted with the urban decay-his plans seek to sweep away. Yet, his relationship with his girlfriend Victoria (Helen Mirren), is another change to the gangster formula; Victoria is just as capable, and powerful a figure-it is her who plays peacemaker and diplomat when Charlie and his underling are preparing to head back to New York, the driving force in social outings, and, in a refreshing change to the gangsters molls of earlier works, Victoria is not only sophisticated but educated.

It is easy to derive a meaning from The Long Good Friday as a reflection of the years and social changes across the rest of the 1980s-in places it's undeniably an uncanny prediction of the decade to come, from its depiction of political volatility to its unflinching depiction of corruption to the heart of the capital's governance. This is to say nothing of the free market sensibilities that almost eerily echo Thatcher; but to call it a film about Thatcherism is to rather miss its focus; not to mention the impact of Thatcher on the British film industry; like Shand's plans, the exit of the Americans would leave UK cinema producing a handful of films a year for much of the decade. What is missed, though, from considering The Long Good Friday through the lens of the decade it was released in, (and indeed, the lens of the decade it was made in), is we are living in Harold Shand's vision of London.

 The Docklands of 1979 have become unrecognisable, great towers of glass, the City, arguably the greatest momument to Thatcherism, to the gentrification of the East End standing yards from where Shand's yacht moored. As Danny Leigh wrote in the Guardian, as the film reached its thirties, almost every single location is now gone, or redeveloped enough to be barely recognisable; even the Olympics that Shand dreams of, would eventually come to his old patch of East London. This new London would attract a far different type of gangster, as the city became truly international, and the Shands and Pinkies and Krays of this world would fade into urban folklore. The Long Good Friday is not just one of the great British Gangster movies, it's arguably the genre's final great depiction of the All-British Gangster.

Rating: Must See (Personal Recommendation)

The Long Good Friday is available on DVD and Bluray from  ‎ Arrow Films. It is available for streaming on Apple TV

Next week, and indeed next month, we swap the UK for Tokyo, as we consider four films set in the Japanese capital, beginning with Akira Kurosawa's 1948 noir, Stray Dog.