The Long Good Fri­day (1980)

Great actors are often able to dis­play great range. But the real trick is pro­ject­ing both ends of the emo­tion­al spec­trum with­in a sin­gle moment. Maybe that’s what crit­i­cal par­lance has char­ac­terised as ​“inner con­flict”, and there’s a great exam­ple to be found of this in John Mackenzie’s 1980 Brit gang­ster saga, The Long Good Fri­day, spe­cial­ly in the form of the late, very great char­ac­ter actor, Bob Hoskins.

His Harold Shand is an exact­ing­ly poured, mixed and shak­en molo­tov cock­tail of hope and despair, say­ing hel­lo to cor­po­rate legit­i­ma­cy, wav­ing good­bye to gang­land trans­gres­sion, but not quite set­tled on either side. It’s the sto­ry of a rois­ter­ing cock­ney geezer who has risen up from the gut­ter by what­ev­er means nec­es­sary, with a gor­geous but wily moll on his arm (Helen Mir­ren), and it’s only through vio­lence and cor­rup­tion has he been able to reach the point when he can final­ly enter this new, good phase of his life.

At the cen­tre of the film is a gigan­tic, Lon­don Dock­lands real-estate deal which has been under­writ­ten by US co-investors, a mid-Atlantic meet­ing of fis­cal mus­cle aimed at legal­ly filch­ing mon­ey from the country’s expand­ing yup­pie class. The sim­ple, almost Shake­speare­an moral is that nefar­i­ous deeds breed a cli­mate of con­tempt, and that any suc­cess will always be tainted.

The film is the chron­i­cle of Shand com­ing to terms with this con­cept, ini­tial­ly think­ing that he’s amassed the funds and the respect to be able to sev­er cer­tain ties with his dark past. He dis­cov­ers that per­son­al suc­cess often serves to bol­ster those ties, as the ghosts of yore begin a cam­paign of high­ly tar­get­ed sab­o­tage just at the time when any men­tion of such for­ma­tive dodgi­ness needs to be suppressed.

Shand sin­cere­ly believes that there is a way to make this work, but he ends up re-employ­ing those vio­lent ten­den­cies as a way to mask them. Hoskins per­for­mance shows a man who clear­ly believes that he’s on the right side of his­to­ry, and once this big, good deal is done, he will have atoned for past sins. The film is bru­tal in the way it con­clu­sive­ly proves him wrong, right down to its icon­ic final shot in which Shand sits in the back of a car strug­gling to set­tle on the emo­tion that would amply cap­ture his fraz­zled state.