Why The Firm has stood its ground for over 25 years

Alan Clarke was one of Britain’s most rad­i­cal, polit­i­cal and ground­break­ing film­mak­ers whose work often focused on society’s under­dogs and fringe groups. His grit­ty social real­ist style has influ­enced every­one from Paul Green­grass to Clio Barnard, Shane Mead­ows and Andrea Arnold.

One of Clarke’s most acclaimed and con­tro­ver­sial films, The Firm shocked tele­vi­sion audi­ences in 1989 with its unflinch­ing depic­tion of foot­ball hooli­gan­ism. In one of his ear­li­est star­ring roles, Gary Old­man plays Bex Bis­sell, the ​‘top boy’ in a Lon­don firm. A sym­bol of Thatcher’s Britain and a prod­uct of his time, Bex is an estate agent addict­ed to the buzz of being a foot­ball hooli­gan. The vio­lent sub­cul­ture is ingrained into his lifestyle. Clarke once stat­ed that the char­ac­ter was a response to how he saw the Tory government’s com­plete mis­un­der­stand­ing of the neolib­er­al soci­ety they had created.

Through­out the 1980s Eng­lish hooli­gan­ism caused a stir all over Europe, arguably peak­ing at the 1990 World Cup in Italy where Eng­land were forced to play all their group stage match­es away from the main­land in the Sar­din­ian cap­i­tal of Cagliari, such was the fans’ rep­u­ta­tion. The Firm may not have reduced week­end vio­lence or altered the image of Eng­lish foot­ball fans, but cru­cial­ly it brought view­ers up close and per­son­al with firm members.

In stark con­trast to the slick­er, glo­ri­fy­ing hooli­gan films that fol­lowed it, The Firm cham­pi­ons a social real­ist view­ing expe­ri­enced enhanced by its low-bud­get aes­thet­ic. It deliv­ers a strong mes­sage while reveal­ing some­thing about the evo­lu­tion of Hooli­gan­ism, address­ing how the sub­cul­ture evolved from attract­ing track-suit­ed ruf­fi­ans to low­er-mid­dle class men by the late ​’80s. No longer was it about work­ing class skin­heads, who orig­i­nal­ly adopt­ed the move­ment in protest against the government.

As seen in The Firm, this new breed of week­end offend­er typ­i­cal­ly worked skilled jobs and wore a sharp-suit­ed look. In a TV inter­view with­in the film, the then mod­ern day hooli­gan is said to desire some form of valid­i­ty in their life. Clarke’s char­ac­ters attempt to prove that they are not cut from the same cloth as the work­ing class ​‘scum’ that pre­vi­ous­ly rep­re­sent­ed hooli­gan cul­ture. But real­ly, despite appear­ance, these hooli­gans were no bet­ter than those who had come before them, although Clarke’s char­ac­ters do appear more inte­grat­ed into society.

Clarke’s pre­rog­a­tive wasn’t to make a shock­ing exposé, but to show how these types of firms oper­at­ed ​“in a rit­u­al­is­tic kind of way.” Short­ly it becomes appar­ent that the vio­lence doesn’t actu­al­ly revolve around foot­ball, but has every­thing to do with the hooli­gans’ machis­mo behav­iour. Clarke him­self was a avid Ever­ton FC sup­port­er and stressed that the main point of the film is that the prob­lem is not foot­ball, but the peo­ple who use the sport as an excuse to exer­cise their hooli­gan­ism. The Firm stress­es this notion through­out to the extent that an extra direct­ly address­es the tele­vi­sion cam­eras, stat­ing that the firm would be caus­ing riots even if they were asso­ci­at­ed with snook­er, ten­nis or darts. To this day, there’s nev­er been a foot­ball hooli­gan film quite like it.