The Long Good Friday

Like Casablanca, The Long Good Friday is one of those crackpot ideas that brilliantly combines mismatched rights and lefts to produce a classic movie, though here the devil lurks at every twist.

Now considered a vintage 1970s British gangster picture, it was a breakout film for its leads Bob Hoskins and Helen Mirren. Each looks terrific: charismatic young actors with great chemistry which makes them fun to watch working together and leading the rest of the cast.

Bob Hoskins and Helen Mirren make for great chemistry in A Long Good Friday.

Hoskins plays Harold Shands, an entrepreneurial East End racketeer who has reigned over a decade of peace and mutual prosperity in the London criminal underworld. Mirren is his partner Victoria. Harold is on the verge of parlaying his ‘corporation’ of shady enterprises into a massive legitimate new casino development in London. George Harris (Bryan Marshall), a London city counsellor on Harold’s payroll, has guided Harold through city zoning, planning and regulatory requirements, and Parky (Dave King), a police detective, is Harold’s inside man in law enforcement. The finishing touch is to bring in a silent partner—Mafia money from the US.         


Derek Thompson and Bryan Marshall in A Long Good Friday.

Key story elements are provided in a series of vignettes quickly filleted into the film’s first ten minutes. Two men are seen through the window of a house. Another man leaves a ship with a suitcase, pauses in a car to help himself to a couple-few bundles of £100 notes from inside, delivers the suitcase, and then proceeds to a pub with the driver. And then through the window we watch three men discover money missing from the suitcase; an automatic weapon suddenly breaks the window in. Two men are seized outside the pub and left dead on a rural road. A woman in mourning meets a coffin coming off a train in London. This woman stops at a sidewalk cafe, lifts her veil and spits in the face of one of the patrons, Jeff Hughes (Derek Thompson), Harold’s business aide, who just had finished a working lunch with the city counsellor.

Patti Love as a mysterious angry widow in The Long Good Friday.

Jeff later meets Harold, fresh off the Concorde from New York, at Heathrow Airport. Harold’s focus is on selling his city-approved development scheme to his prospective Mafia ‘cousins’. Jeff assures Harold that everything has been ‘all right’ in his brief absence.

Harold prepares with Victoria to meet ‘the Americans’ on his yacht in the London docklands (the actual location is the St Katharine Docks); his casino development apparently is slated for the Isle of Dogs farther east which Harold says he wants to revive. He pours Victoria a Bloody Mary on a sunny Good Friday morning. Victoria reassures Harold that everything is ready, but wonders whether they should have met their visitors at the airport.

Helen Mirren and Bob Hoskins: a Bloody Mary on Good Friday.

‘Naw, play it cool. When the governor of Coca-Cola drops in to London, the Queen doesn't go dashing off to Heafrow, does she?’ says Harold.

‘Queen?’ asks Victoria.

‘Yeah, well you know what I mean. All played up, right? You went to school with Princess Anne, played hockey with her, all that,’ Harold said.

‘It’s lacrosse at Benenden, hockey's frightfully vulgar,’ Victoria replies affectedly.

Harold guffaws: ‘Yes, yes plenty of tha’, yeah. The Yanks love snobbery. They really feel they've arrived in England if the upper classes treat them like shit.’

‘Gives them a sense of hist’ry,’ Victoria continues.

To which Harold snorts: ‘Yuh yuh yuh—Yeah.’

Harold meets The Americans: Charlie Restivo (Eddie Constantine) and Tony (Steve Davies).

The Americans arrive: Charlie Restivo (Eddie Constantine) and his consiglière Tony Giamazzi (Steve Davies). Casting Constantine in this role is along the line of Quentin Tarantino later bringing back Lawrence Tierney, a heavy in 1940s and 1950s US crime movies, as Joe Cabot, the criminal boss in Reservoir Dogs (1992). An American-born actor, Constantine had been a fixture in 1950s French crime dramas as Lemmy Caution, a Sam Spade-like private detective character. Not just that: Jean-Luc Godard later cast Constantine to reprise his famous role in Alphaville (1965), his postmodern homage to the detective genre (and also afterward in Allemagne 90 neuf zero in 1991). 

Eddie Constantine as Lemmy Caution

Harold’s circumstances are confidently luxurious. But things start to go wrong. Colin (Paul Freeman), the man we first see taking money from the suitcase, is Harold’s top enforcer. He is knifed at a public swimming pool pursuing a homosexual liaison with a character identified only as ‘1st Irishman’—Pierce Brosnan in his first film role. A car bomb kills Eric (Charles Cork), one of Harold’s men, waiting in a Rolls Royce outside a church for Harold’s mother (Ruby Head) at her third Good Friday service of the day. And a bomb is discovered at Harold’s Mayfair casino. 

Pierce Brosnan lays a trap in The Long Good Friday.

A pool attendant (Brian Hayes) tells Harold: ‘I've kept it all incognito, they're gonna collect [Colin’s] body in an ice cream van.’ To which Harold replies: ‘There's a lot of dignity in that, isn't there? Going out like a raspberry ripple.’

We learn with Harold that the port at the opening of the story and pub are in Belfast and the farmhouse is in rural Northern Ireland. The woman who spit at Jeff, Carol Benson (Patti Love), is the widow of Phil Benson (Leo Dolan), who was driving Colin’s car in Belfast and later found dead on a Northern Ireland roadside. And whoever is plotting the mishaps is too well informed of Harry’s moves not to have someone inside his operation.


Victoria (Mirren) consoles Harold (Hoskins) on Holy Saturday.  

The rest of this long Good Friday—and most of Holy Saturday—is Harold’s race to solve the whodunit.

The Long Good Friday 1980 U.K. HandMade Films (113 min) directed by John Mackenzie; written by Barrie Keeffe (original title The Paddy Factor); casting by Simone Reynolds; editing by Mike Taylor; music by Francis Monkman; art direction by Vic Symonds; cinematography by Phil Meheux.