The Long Good Friday: Bob Hoskins back with a vengeance

‘I’m not a politician - I’m a businessman with a sense of history. I’m also a Londoner, and today is a day of great historical significance for London. Our country’s not an island anymore - we’re a leading European state.’ - Bob Hoskins as Harold Shand in The Long Good Friday.

Thirty five years ago The Long Good Friday reinvented the British gangster film, and launched the film career of an emerging actor called Bob Hoskins. This week, it’s released in cinemas and on DVD and Blu-ray, in a new restoration.

Hoskins was born to play Harold Shand, an East End gangster who yearns to become a respectable property tycoon.

However it wasn’t only Hoskins’ acting which made The Long Good Friday a classic. The film’s plot now seems uncannily prophetic. Shand plans to redevelop London’s derelict docklands, a storyline which foresaw the construction of Canary Wharf.

He dreams of transforming this urban wilderness into a high-rise yuppie paradise, but his plan falls apart when he tangles with the IRA...

The Long Good Friday anticipated the ruthless entrepreneurialism of the 1980s, when big business became trendy, and greed was good. Yet although it’s of its time, this gutsy thriller has hardly dated.

Barrie Keeffe’s screenplay crackles with streetwise one-liners; Phil Méheux’s intense camerawork puts the viewer at the heart of every scene.

Director John Mackenzie brings the best out of his actors, and paints a powerful portrait of a metropolis where crime and politics co-exist.

Hoskins bestrides this film like a cockney colossus, but there are loads of other fine performances: Helen Mirren plays Shand’s posh girlfriend; Pierce Brosnan (in his first movie) plays an IRA hitman.

You’d never guess the total budget was under a million pounds.

Bob Hoskins died in 2014, and John Mackenzie died in 2011, but Barrie Keeffe and Phil Méheux are both very much alive, and on Friday, 19 June they’re meeting up at the British Film Institute, on London’s South Bank, to talk about The Long Good Friday at a special screening.

Last week, I caught up with them in London to hear about their memories of the film.

Barrie Keeffe was born in London’s East End, and started his career working on a local newspaper.‘This was just before the Krays’ empire came to an end, and quite a few of the things in the film are things I actually experienced as a journalist.’

As a young reporter, he was sent to hospital to interview a man who’d been nailed to the floor by gangsters. Keeffe used this detail in the film. He wrote the first draft a month before Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister. ‘I sat down to start writing on Good Friday. I finished it on Easter Monday.’

When Mackenzie cast Hoskins, Keeffe knew he’d be perfect. ‘He was such a force of energy,’ says Keeffe. ‘He means every word he says.’

Today The Long Good Friday is widely regarded as one of the best British movies ever made, but it very nearly vanished without a trace.

Made for Lew Grade’s production company, ITC, it was earmarked for the big screen, but in the midst of the Troubles, a film about terrorism defeating capitalism (even crooked capitalism) was considered too controversial for cinema.

ITC decided to show it on TV, cut from 111 minutes to 83. ‘It would have been meaningless on television,’ says Keeffe. ‘It would have been wallpaper.’

To make matters even worse, ITC decided to have Hoskins overdubbed by an actor with a Brummie accent. Ironically, it was this bizarre decision which saved the film.

Hoskins’ contract stipulated that his voice could only be overdubbed with his permission. Hoskins refused to budge, and Britain’s greatest actors supported him.

‘Robbing an actor of his voice is perhaps the single worst thing one can do to him,’ declared Sir Alec Guinness. ‘When one takes away his voice, one takes away his heart and soul.’

The Long Good Friday looked destined to remain in legal limbo (‘It was such a dreadful shame that they could even think of dumping it,’ says Méheux) but then Hoskins met Eric Idle at a party and asked him if he’d like to buy a film (Idle had just had a big hit with Monty Python’s The Life of Brian, produced by George Harrison’s Handmade Films).

Handmade bought The Long Good Friday from Lew Grade, and put it into cinemas, in Britain and the USA.

Despite its East End vernacular, it got rave reviews in the States. Newsweek called Hoskins a cockney Edward G Robinson. ‘I thought they’d have trouble with the dialogue,’ says Méheux. But America lapped it up.

Keeffe and Meheux created brilliant words and pictures, but, ultimately, The Long Good Friday belongs to Hoskins.

Hoskins didn’t just play Harold Shand – he became him. ‘Bob piledrives that film all the way through,’ says Meheux. ‘He came from that sort of background and he brought that to the part.’

‘What I’m looking for is someone who can contribute to what England has given to the world,’ says Hoskins, at the end of this exhilarating movie. ‘Culture, sophistication, genius...’ He could have been talking about himself.

The Long Good Friday is released on DVD and Blu-ray by Arrow Films.