The Long Good Friday: Corporate Governance

It is the way Harold’s conception of himself towers over the reality that makes this often despicable man a sympathetic and even tragic proposition. He is one of numerous reprobates on Hoskins’s résumé. In the 1977 stage musical England England, the actor played one half of a pair of gangland twins (Jim and Jake) modeled on the Krays. (By then, Richard Burton had already been seen as a sadistic gay gangster inspired by Ronnie in 1971’s Villain, the first of many Kray-based movies.) You might say, then, that Hoskins, like Harold, emerged from the Krays’ shadow. When Harold talks proudly of “ten years of peace,” he is alluding to the decade between the brothers’ being banged up for life in 1969 and the year the film was set. His awareness of image and spin comes directly from their playbook: he exaggerates the most tenuous royal connection to impress the visiting New York mafioso Charlie (Eddie Constantine, the craggy sleuth from Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville). That counts for naught once Harold’s authority is undermined by the IRA attacks on the eve of his business deal with Charlie. Here, too, he is following in the footsteps of the Krays, who fostered connections with the gangster Meyer Lansky, and hoped to profit from the mob’s drug dealing and money laundering in London. Those hopes didn’t last long: having somehow secured a visa, Ronnie arrived in New York to meet with Lansky, only to be sent straight home by immigration.

Harold’s ambitious plan involves redeveloping London’s once-thriving Docklands. By 1930, a hundred thousand people were employed there across seven hundred acres and nearly two thousand wharves. But the area fell into neglect with the arrival in the late 1960s of containerization, which the early-nineteenth-century docks were too small to handle. It grew into a slick business hive in the 1990s, served by a monorail threading between flashy riverfront apartment buildings and rehabilitated warehouses. From the upper reaches of Canary Wharf’s fifty-story centerpiece tower, office workers could watch the Millennium Dome (now the O2 arena) being built across the river in nearby Greenwich. The Long Good Friday captures this regeneration in its infancy, with cranes lining the docks like derricks. Today the area’s potential feels drastically reduced, its huddle of stubby skyscrapers resembling the trophy shelf of a midranking college football team.

The movie premiered at the London Film Festival in November 1980, eighteen months almost to the day since the Conservatives came to power. It is part of a batch of films that nailed the volatility of Thatcherism, its sense of sudden social free fall. Other examples include three pictures by Stephen Frears: the Hanson-produced Bloody Kids (1979) and two written by Hanif Kureishi, My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987). And The Long Good Friday belongs to the United Kingdom’s tradition of uncompromising crime movies, from Brighton Rock (1948) to Get Carter (1971), partly because it shows with such lucidity how the gangsters on the street take their cues from the ones in office. Harold, described by Keeffe as “the ultimate Thatcherite,” is a free-market hooligan. He has police and city planners in his pocket. He calls his outfit “the Corporation” (the Krays’ equivalent was “the Firm”). Like most East End louts of his generation, he dotes on his mother, gets sentimental about the Empire, and invokes “the Dunkirk spirit” at the drop of an aitch.

Naturally, his moll is regally named. Helen Mirren, who later played Elizabeth II on film in The Queen (2006) and onstage in The Audience (2013 and 2015), had a fight on her hands fleshing out the role of Victoria. Hanson conceded that it had been written as “a pea-brained tart,” adding: “You don’t get someone as intelligent as Helen to play a bimbo.” Her experience on set was an unhappy one; she badgered Mackenzie to give the character more heft, more purpose. “I really wanted to drag her into the story line,” she said. “I couldn’t have done it without Bob, who gave me so much support.” Mackenzie confessed to having “a few tussles with Helen,” and enraged her by describing Victoria as Harold’s “acolyte.” It is thanks to Mirren that she is far more than that: his armor rather than his arm candy.

Victoria is so coolly composed that when Mirren finally shows her cracking under pressure, the effect is scarier than any of the disasters that have led up to it. She holds her nerve after the first bomb kills Harold’s chauffeur and the second destroys his pub, but when she tearfully confesses to being frightened, we know things are bad. Of course, that idea came from Mirren. Mackenzie said it “made her so human, not weak at all.”

In contrast to Victoria, Harold’s name reeks of soiled splendor: Shand combines shabby and grand, which describes this jumped-up oik to a T. British ears will also hear in Harold Shand an echo of hand shandy, a colloquialism for masturbation. The movie is openly calling its own protagonist a wanker. Hoskins, though, plays this numpty as if he were Napoleon. It’s delicious watching Harold swagger and preen, a middle-aged toddler oblivious to his own shortcomings. What elevates the film is its boldness in showing a British bulldog outgunned by the IRA expressly because of his tactical inferiority, his adherence to the hollow values championed by the Conservatives. The free market, it transpires, is no match for freedom fighters.

The one area in which Harold diverges from the Conservatives of the day, it seems, is in his nonchalance toward homosexuality: he long ago accepted that his childhood friend Colin (Paul Freeman) is gay. Colin’s death at the hands of a poolside stud (a cameo from Pierce Brosnan) led Vito Russo in The Celluloid Closet to insist that the character was only written as gay “so that he can be dramatically murdered while cruising . . . His sexual desire leads him to death.” A less simplistic take might be that the casual depiction of Colin’s sexuality puts the film in step with both the queer tradition of the modern British gangster movie—from Performance to Mojo (1997), Sexy Beast (2000) to I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead (2003)—and the Jean Genet–esque association between queerness and criminality.

While the movie shows a queer man as one unexceptional member of the Corporation, Harold extends no such welcome to people of color. He indulges in racist banter, and laments the lack of “decent families” in Brixton, South London—an insult too loud to qualify as a dog whistle. While UK television of the day was awash with racist caricatures, the film resists Harold’s dehumanizing language by rendering vividly, if briefly, its sole Black character: a police informer named Erroll (Paul Barber), who is yanked out of bed naked before being slashed with a machete by the eerily expressionless Razors (P. H. Moriarty). This is the second instance in which sex is interrupted by a blade (Colin’s demise is the first), but only in Erroll’s case does the camera force us to engage fully with the victim’s humanity. His body is left scarred. So, too, is the film.

The butchery motif extends beyond that scene. “I’ll have his carcass dripping blood by midnight,” Harold fumes at his unknown tormentor. Associates, suspects, and informants are hanged by their ankles among slabs of livid pink meat in an abattoir. When Charlie reneges on the Docklands deal, Harold belittles him by reducing America’s cultural contribution to “an ’ot dog.” Alexander Walker in the Evening Standard also reached for meat-based imagery, warning squeamish viewers that the picture’s violence “is only the bloodied wrapping paper on a hunk of fresh-cut life.”

Flesh and money are Harold’s currencies, but it’s ideologies that endure. Perhaps he grasps this at last in the devastating final shot. Before shooting the extended close-up of Harold in the back of the car driven by his IRA abductors, Mackenzie asked Hoskins simply to replay the film in his head during the take. “The camera will see you think,” he said. And it’s true: we can feel the events of the past few days drifting over Harold’s face like the stages of grief, or the phases of the moon. The sense of his fate’s inevitability is intensified by the return of Francis Monkman’s energized main theme, with its buzzing, high-voltage needles of electronic sound, its reedy soprano sax, and its clattering drums like a series of sharp blows to the kidneys. The score keeps renewing itself throughout the movie, introducing fresh themes, motifs, and arrangements. This has the effect of injecting regular doses of dynamism, but also of wrong-footing us. The musical climate shifts unpredictably, just as the landscape does for Harold.

That sustained close-up echoes powerfully an earlier scene of him in his pomp as he delivers a triumphant speech aboard his boat on the Thames. Looming behind him, Tower Bridge seems to box Harold in, enclosing him in its parentheses, only for it to shrink into the distance as the boat gradually leaves it behind. It is as if Harold’s ambitions for London to “become Europe’s capital” (a real post-Brexit “ouch” moment today) have turned him into Gulliver, making him too big for the bridge—and for his boots. Seething at gunpoint in the car, he is once again moving forward in close-up, just as he was on the river, but now he is going nowhere. Despite the promise implied by the film’s title, there will be no resurrection.