In this golden age of home viewing, the Criterion Collection still provides some of the best editions of the best movies ever released, usually with a rich selection of extras and often including audio commentaries (a feature they pioneered, and perhaps the greatest gift ever to film students and cinephiles alike). This column features one Criterion release per week, based entirely on where my interests lead me.
When we first meet Harold Shand (Bob Hoskins in a breakthrough role) in John Mackenzie’s The Long Good Friday, he’s clawed his way to the top of the London underworld and is about to enter the brave new world of semi-legitimate finance, where the rewards to be made are much greater and the risk to life and limb much less. Specifically he’s put together a deal to develop the London Docklands, which have gone to ruin since the advent of container shipping in the 1960s made them obsolete.
Shand has his team assembled and is wining and dining them on his ostentatious yacht. They include the money guys Charlie (Eddie Constantine) and his associate Tony (Stephen Davies), both American gangsters, plus a local politician (Bryan Marshall) to facilitate matters. Another key player is also present: Shand’s glamorous and sophisticated girlfriend, Victoria (Helen Mirren, also in a breakthrough role) who’s smarter than he is and is essential to the leap upwards he anticipates (the role was rewritten at Mirren’s insistence to make her more than a stereotypical moll).
Just as Shand is about to close the deal, things start to go wrong. First, he receives word that his friend Colin (Paul Freeman) has been murdered. Then a bomb goes off in a pub he owns (having restored it beautifully,* although the surrounding neighborhood still lies in ruins) just as he was arriving with his development team. Another bomb was placed in a casino he owns, and while that one failed to detonate, the message is clear. Shand has no idea what’s going on but needs to find out and solve it before his investors get spooked.
The Long Good Friday, the prototype for many British gangster films to come, opens with an almost dialogue-free sequence that contains clues as to what’s going on, but you won’t fully understand it until much later in the film. Hoskins delivers a brilliant portrait of a man who was excellent in his own way but ultimately undone the very limitations that brought him to the top of London gangsterdom—most notably his inability to understand that the big world he’s trying to enter is much larger and more complicated than he thinks it is. He’s like a general still fighting the last war while the world around him has shifted, and he doesn’t realize that dominating the fast-moving, international world of global capital and real estate has quite different requirements than strong-arming his way to the top of the old-fashioned gangster world of the Kray twins and the Richardson gang.
Besides its merits as a thriller, The Long Good Friday also offers a brilliant portrayal of London in the late 1970s and uncannily anticipates events just a few years in the future. Margaret Thatcher’s government came to power in 1979, while this film was shooting, but England’s working class was already suffering from the decline of manufacturing, mining, and docklands jobs, and Thatcher’s agenda would make things even worse. Shand’s plans to redevelop the Docklands came true, although a few years later, and he also anticipated the mix of organized crime and legitimate business such development possible.
Shand and his associates, many of whom have names like “Razors” (P. H. Moriarty) and “Parky” (Dave King), live in a world where violence can break out at any moment, and it’s nearly always administered low-tech, up-close and personal. But The Long Good Friday also has moments of exceptional humor, which acts as a relief valve in the same way that comedy often does in a horror film. To name just one: when a warehouse guard is discovered nailed to a warehouse floor, Shand exclaims “You’re not supposed to crucify anyone outside of a church on Good Friday!”
The Long Good Friday is something of a prequel to both The Gold (a BBC fictional miniseries about the 1983 Brinks-Mat robbery) and Patrick Radden Keefe’s nonfiction book London Falling (about the 2019 death of a young man under obscure circumstances). The connections are many, but here’s one of my favorites: Shand’s yacht in The Long Good Friday was rented from Abdul Shamji, father of Akbar Shamji, a London businessman who was with the young man at the center of the mystery in London Falling shortly before his death. | Sarah Boslaugh
*The pub was just a set but constructed so realistically that people would come in and order drinks.
Spine #: 26.
Technical details: length; color or B&W; screen ratio; language.
Edition reviewed: Blu-ray (2 discs).
Extras: introduction by Ashley Clark, curatorial director of the Criterion Collection; audio commentary by director John Mackenzie (one takeaway—the only thing he hates more than shooting in cars is shooting on boats); documentary The Accidental Studio about Handmade Films, founded in 1979 by George Harrison (yes, that George Harrison), which distributed this and many other significant independent British films; 2008 documentary Bloody Business: Making The Long Good Friday; 2015 interview with screenwriter Barrie Keeffe; 2015 interview with screenwriter Phil Méheux; 2015 featurette comparing the soundtracks of the U.S. and U.K. releases of The Long Good Friday; U.S. and U.K. trailers.
Fun Fact: One of the characters in The Long Good Friday includes a gay character: Shand’s friend Colin, who is stabbed in an early scene by a young and very handsome Pierce Brosnan (in his film debut) in what Colin no doubt thought would be a much more enjoyable encounter.
Parting Thought: Harold Shand is up against an organization whose members are often labeled “ political terrorists.” But Shand himself commits acts of violence to intimidate civilians in the service of his objectives, so would it be fair to call him a capitalist terrorist?
