The Long Good Friday

30/10/2025

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The Generic Real

       It might seem odd suggesting a gangster film falls under the rubric of realism but, while Britain and its immediate neighbour Ireland, sometimes has had a yen for the needlessly exaggerated as it apes Hollywood (Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Rancid Aluminium) or plays up the jokey (The Italian Job, In Bruges),  it also on occasion locates the genre in the specifics of milieu. If The Long Good Friday (and the more generic but still realistic Get Carter) is amongst the greatest of gangster films, it rests on the film’s respect for reality over its deviation from it. 

     This starts with the plausibility of its premise, which even has a strong element of the prescient. Bob Hoskins is Harold Shand, a patriot who wants to make Britain great again and thinks he can do so by developing the disused docks on the Thames. “We deliberately set it in Docklands because we knew it was going to be huge”, director John MacKenzie says. “We didn’t know how, but we knew it was going to be developed.” (Hot Dog) As Harold says while giving a speech on a boat sailing down the river, with Tower Bridge receding in the background, “this is the decade in which London will become Europe’s capital.” He also thinks he can midwife it into great success as on board is an American gangster and the gangster’s lawyer. Harold wants to impress them, but what he doesn’t know is that his firm is about to be taken apart by another realistic dimension of the story: the IRA. While Harold has been in New York making deals, other gang members have gone behind his back and been siphoning money to the republican cause. They have to do so, we later find out, to keep the Irish builders in London happy, and Harry’s contact in the council needs them onside if he is going to build the buildings Harry wants built.

       This time, the deal has gone wrong, and after the money gets handed over in a cottage in Ireland, the counter-terrorists take them out. It seems to be a coincidence, but the IRA thinks that the London gang has double-crossed them, and they start taking revenge. When Harry hears that his best friend was killed at a swimming pool, that his mother almost died in a car bombing, and that another bomb was found in his casino, Shand assumes a gang rival is behind all this mayhem. Jeff, his right-hand man, knows, but isn’t telling — aware that Harold will be more than unhappy he has been working behind his back and dealing with the IRA. Harold is a patriot we need to remember, and the IRA are seeking a united Ireland. 

          This fills in the plot, but what matters for our purposes is the amount of realism McKenzie insists upon. Realism in cinema can take various forms, though it is usually foregrounded. Films by Vittorio de Sica, Roberto Rossellini, Tony Richardson and Ken Loach pay attention to the impoverished reality of people’s immediate lives; Mackenzie looks to make it more part of the background. Mackenzie started out as Loach’s assistant on Up the Junction and Cathy Come Home, and central to realism has been putting on screen the stories of the deprived and the dispossessed. Yet one way of giving texture to genre is by acknowledging the presence of the poverty-stricken and the political, but as background verisimilitude over foregrounded destitution. When Harold and the American gangster, Charlie (Eddie Constantine) are reunited in London, Harold says “the boy from New Jersey", and the American replies, “the boy from Stepney.” These are lads who have made good from the sort of working-class places that realism usually films. “We shall thus call realist”, Andre Bazin said, “any system of expression or narrative procedures tending to make more reality appear on the screen.” (Realism and the Cinema) This might usually mean the presentation of working class life that has been central, of course, to realist movements like neorealism (Bicycle Thieves, Germany Year Zero, Umberto D) and kitchen sink realism (A Kind of Loving, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, A Taste of Honey). Yet there is no reason why it cannot also incorporate into the generic the lived reality of its time.  

      The biggest disruptive threat in British lives during the 70s and 80s was from the IRA. A conflict that escalated in Northern Ireland and spilt over onto the British mainland, it gives the film's events an immediate and troublesome reality, one that led the producers into a paradox. “They wanted to cut all the violence and IRA references out," Mackenzie noted. ''While we were editing our version they were editing their version in the basement.” (Cinephilia and Beyond) The producers wanted to remove what they saw as the glamorisation of the IRA, but also wanted edits out of fear that the IRA would bomb the cinema. As McKenzie noted: “They thought it was unpatriotic and pro-IRA… “They thought they’d have their cinemas bombed. I said, ‘If it’s pro-IRA, why would they bomb it?’ They decided they’d sell it as a package for TV and chop it down from 105 to 70 minutes.” (Hot Dog)

       What is clear in such an exchange is the ongoing reality the film wanted to access and thus why some in the production were worried the film would lead to another IRA atrocity. While it doesn’t glamourise the movement and indeed hardly allows them an onscreen presence, the film does make clear that while Harold is a gangster and businessman in a violent world acting out of self-interest, the IRA are in it for national self-determination — as both the bent cop and the bought counsellor make clear, even if Harold isn’t listening. The cop tells him that he can’t take on the IRA: when Harold tells him he runs London, the copper says not anymore — “they’re taking it away from you.” Later, the councillor yells at the oblivious H, “They aren’t interested in money. They’re political. They are fanatics.”  

             When Bazin, Sigfried Kracauer and others argued for realism, they did so often from an ethical and epistemological perspective, seeing in film the ability to observe the everyday and to give dignity to people’s lives. It was a way of escaping the generic expectation that had built up over the years, and could give the image over to a greater observational focus. Kracauer reckoned, for example, that film was a brilliant medium of exposure: that cinema offered three types of revealing functions. Images, “tend to reveal things normally unseen: phenomena overwhelming consciousness and certain aspects of the outer world which may be called ‘special modes of reality’.” (Theory of Film) These were things too big or too small to be usually caught by the human eye, things that move too fast for the eye to see and can be slowed down, and objects that we might not see, but potentially can in a film if we watch it over and over again. These were honourable approaches to the medium, allowing it to be much more than entertainment. 

     But in time, realism also allowed filmmakers to work within genre without finding themselves beholden to a limited set of typologies. Harold is very much the gangster made good, and there is the henchman (Razors), the bent copper, the moll (played by Helen Mirren), the second-in-command who betrays him. But the bent copper isn’t just a type here, he is also someone who, from his perspective, is doing a good job. When he speaks to Harold about the calm of the last decade, he says it is all thanks to H — but there is self-congratulation in his remarks as well. He has been working with Harold for ten years, keeping the peace. The officer doesn’t see himself as the bent copper of the genre, but the wise pragmatist who finds the best way to keep everything functioning smoothly, and he isn’t wrong. If the gang world is scared of Harold, and the cop can make sure H does lots of the policing for him, where is the problem if he gets some back-handers? Equally, Mirren’s moll Victoria isn’t the one-dimensional figure standing by her man and getting the back of his hand. She is an important part of the operation, vital to Harold’s sanity and his status. 

     Early on, Victoria speaks fluent French to the chef on the boat, and later explains to Harry why she has been open with Charlie about what has been going on. Harold quickly realises what she says makes sense. Late in the film, Harold pushes her aggressively down on the couch, and rather than Harold forcing Victoria to know her place, he quickly realises how misplaced his anger happens to be. When Victoria turns away and starts to cry, it reflects the tension they have both been feeling as the violence escalates and they come to see their lives are in danger. Mirren talked about the original script showing a much less developed Victoria, and saw a great film with a weak female lead. “She was basically the girlfriend in the corner, and I wanted to bring her into the story. So I signed up with great alacrity and excitement, with the caveat that I wanted to change Victoria…" Mirren adds, she was "the kind of girl who might have grown up in a nice house in Kingston. Not posh-posh. Maybe her dad was a very successful car dealer. She is smart and intelligent. She brings class to Harold’s operation, and he needs her.” (Guardian) 

            With the plausible motivations of the cop, the complexity of Victoria, the presence of the IRA and the story predicated on the Docklands development, as it shows several scenes in the area, the film arrives at what might seem a contradiction in terms: generic realism. Yet it was far from alone, as many films of the 70s and into the 80s showed an interest in what could seem like tired tropes, yet reinvigorated by socio-political concerns and/or an exploration of milieux. While The Long Goodbye insisted on exploring contemporary LA almost to the detriment of the story it was telling, Chinatown delved into LA’s past to set the story amidst the developing city and its water supply. The latter is far from historically accurate, but it nevertheless gives to the fiction an added socio-political texture, which in turn adds greatly to the intricacy of the plot. Chinatown might have become a standard work of pastiche were it not for screenwriter Robert Towne’s interest in exploring how a city in the midst of the desert gets its water supply. The Long Good Friday, like Get Carter, isn’t too far removed from kitchen sink realism in Get Carter’s case, and the post-kitchen sink films of the late seventies and early eighties in The Long Good Friday’s. Most kitchen sink works were set in the Midlands or the north of England (Derby, Nottingham, Manchester) and Get Carter offers a residue of this regional flavour in a story about a London-based character returning to Newcastle to find out about his brother’s death. The Long Good Friday was part of a realism based based further south and often in and around London: films like Meantime, Made in Britain, Rude Boy, Giro City and Babylon. They were produced with the hovering presence of Thatcher, and though she remains unnamed here, it is surely her spirit that Harold channels when he wants to revitalise the British economy. “Shand is perhaps the first truly Thatcherite antihero of British cinema” (BFI) Lou Thomas proposes, a claim made all the more viable with the film making the most of its Docklands location, as Thatcher would do likewise as she helped turn the area into the financial capital of Europe.  ‘"If you want a physical reminder of the change under Thatcher, Canary Wharf is a very good example: when she came along they were derelict docks,’ said Charles Moore, the author of Margaret Thatcher's authorized biography and former editor of the Daily Telegraph.” (Reuters) 

      Without this concern over the potential development of the Docklands area, without creating characters who have complex and individual motivations and emotions, and without the presence of the IRA capable of upsetting Harold’s plans as no crime organisation could have, the film would have been unlikely to have stood the test of time. It has stood that test by incorporating its moment. When Harold, Victoria and Charlie drive to the traditional pub where they will have lunch, we see the bomb going off just as they arrive at their destination. This is technically skilful filmmaking that incorporated realism of its own as the actors didn’t know exactly when the explosion would take place. But McKenzie would also have been aware that it would conjure up images not just from films but from life, and from photographs covering the aftermath of various IRA attacks on pubs in Guildford and Birmingham only a few years before.  When the film shows us Victoria and Harold helping others out of the pub amidst the wreckage, it well knows this is a trauma that goes beyond the immediate shock of a film image. 

         What we can take away from the film is how realism needn’t only be anti-generic in its determination to show as much as possible real life in the raw, with Bazin claiming, “the assemblage of film must never add anything to the existing reality.” ('De Sica: Metteur en scene’) Genre filmmaking can very much add to that reality as it combines established codes with attention to the societal and the characterisationally complex. The Long Good Friday is one such film, as good an example as any of the ‘Gangster as Tragic Hero,‘ when Robert Warshow says of this figure: “this is our intolerable dilemma: that failure is a kind of death and success is evil and dangerous, is—ultimately—impossible. The effect of the gangster film is to embody this dilemma in the person of the gangster and resolve it by his death. The dilemma is resolved because it is his death, not ours. We are safe; for the moment, we can acquiesce in our failure, we can choose to fail.”

    Harold is its embodiment, and his failure became Thatcher’s success as the film asks us to see the tragic hero’s fall. Yet Harold's is very much a tragedy of our time, a figure blind to the events that have recently taken place in Ireland but astute to the possibilities in front of him if he can gain funding for the development of his project. Looking at the film years after it was made can make it seem more tragic still for Harold, with many, many millions being made in what was then disused land and warehouses. Some might insist that such ruminations have no place in how we perceive the film, but let us claim it is a vital aspect of its retrospective perception. The film, like Harold, was well aware this was prime real estate in the making, even if the film explores much more the undoing of Harold, just at the moment when the boy from Stepney looked like he could have gone on to become the king of Canary Wharf.

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

The Long Good Friday

The Generic Real

       It might seem odd suggesting a gangster film falls under the rubric of realism but, while Britain and its immediate neighbour Ireland, sometimes has had a yen for the needlessly exaggerated as it apes Hollywood (Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Rancid Aluminium) or plays up the jokey (The Italian Job, In Bruges),  it also on occasion locates the genre in the specifics of milieu. If The Long Good Friday (and the more generic but still realistic Get Carter) is amongst the greatest of gangster films, it rests on the film’s respect for reality over its deviation from it. 

     This starts with the plausibility of its premise, which even has a strong element of the prescient. Bob Hoskins is Harold Shand, a patriot who wants to make Britain great again and thinks he can do so by developing the disused docks on the Thames. “We deliberately set it in Docklands because we knew it was going to be huge”, director John MacKenzie says. “We didn’t know how, but we knew it was going to be developed.” (Hot Dog) As Harold says while giving a speech on a boat sailing down the river, with Tower Bridge receding in the background, “this is the decade in which London will become Europe’s capital.” He also thinks he can midwife it into great success as on board is an American gangster and the gangster’s lawyer. Harold wants to impress them, but what he doesn’t know is that his firm is about to be taken apart by another realistic dimension of the story: the IRA. While Harold has been in New York making deals, other gang members have gone behind his back and been siphoning money to the republican cause. They have to do so, we later find out, to keep the Irish builders in London happy, and Harry’s contact in the council needs them onside if he is going to build the buildings Harry wants built.

       This time, the deal has gone wrong, and after the money gets handed over in a cottage in Ireland, the counter-terrorists take them out. It seems to be a coincidence, but the IRA thinks that the London gang has double-crossed them, and they start taking revenge. When Harry hears that his best friend was killed at a swimming pool, that his mother almost died in a car bombing, and that another bomb was found in his casino, Shand assumes a gang rival is behind all this mayhem. Jeff, his right-hand man, knows, but isn’t telling — aware that Harold will be more than unhappy he has been working behind his back and dealing with the IRA. Harold is a patriot we need to remember, and the IRA are seeking a united Ireland. 

          This fills in the plot, but what matters for our purposes is the amount of realism McKenzie insists upon. Realism in cinema can take various forms, though it is usually foregrounded. Films by Vittorio de Sica, Roberto Rossellini, Tony Richardson and Ken Loach pay attention to the impoverished reality of people’s immediate lives; Mackenzie looks to make it more part of the background. Mackenzie started out as Loach’s assistant on Up the Junction and Cathy Come Home, and central to realism has been putting on screen the stories of the deprived and the dispossessed. Yet one way of giving texture to genre is by acknowledging the presence of the poverty-stricken and the political, but as background verisimilitude over foregrounded destitution. When Harold and the American gangster, Charlie (Eddie Constantine) are reunited in London, Harold says “the boy from New Jersey", and the American replies, “the boy from Stepney.” These are lads who have made good from the sort of working-class places that realism usually films. “We shall thus call realist”, Andre Bazin said, “any system of expression or narrative procedures tending to make more reality appear on the screen.” (Realism and the Cinema) This might usually mean the presentation of working class life that has been central, of course, to realist movements like neorealism (Bicycle Thieves, Germany Year Zero, Umberto D) and kitchen sink realism (A Kind of Loving, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, A Taste of Honey). Yet there is no reason why it cannot also incorporate into the generic the lived reality of its time.  

      The biggest disruptive threat in British lives during the 70s and 80s was from the IRA. A conflict that escalated in Northern Ireland and spilt over onto the British mainland, it gives the film's events an immediate and troublesome reality, one that led the producers into a paradox. “They wanted to cut all the violence and IRA references out," Mackenzie noted. ''While we were editing our version they were editing their version in the basement.” (Cinephilia and Beyond) The producers wanted to remove what they saw as the glamorisation of the IRA, but also wanted edits out of fear that the IRA would bomb the cinema. As McKenzie noted: “They thought it was unpatriotic and pro-IRA… “They thought they’d have their cinemas bombed. I said, ‘If it’s pro-IRA, why would they bomb it?’ They decided they’d sell it as a package for TV and chop it down from 105 to 70 minutes.” (Hot Dog)

       What is clear in such an exchange is the ongoing reality the film wanted to access and thus why some in the production were worried the film would lead to another IRA atrocity. While it doesn’t glamourise the movement and indeed hardly allows them an onscreen presence, the film does make clear that while Harold is a gangster and businessman in a violent world acting out of self-interest, the IRA are in it for national self-determination — as both the bent cop and the bought counsellor make clear, even if Harold isn’t listening. The cop tells him that he can’t take on the IRA: when Harold tells him he runs London, the copper says not anymore — “they’re taking it away from you.” Later, the councillor yells at the oblivious H, “They aren’t interested in money. They’re political. They are fanatics.”  

             When Bazin, Sigfried Kracauer and others argued for realism, they did so often from an ethical and epistemological perspective, seeing in film the ability to observe the everyday and to give dignity to people’s lives. It was a way of escaping the generic expectation that had built up over the years, and could give the image over to a greater observational focus. Kracauer reckoned, for example, that film was a brilliant medium of exposure: that cinema offered three types of revealing functions. Images, “tend to reveal things normally unseen: phenomena overwhelming consciousness and certain aspects of the outer world which may be called ‘special modes of reality’.” (Theory of Film) These were things too big or too small to be usually caught by the human eye, things that move too fast for the eye to see and can be slowed down, and objects that we might not see, but potentially can in a film if we watch it over and over again. These were honourable approaches to the medium, allowing it to be much more than entertainment. 

     But in time, realism also allowed filmmakers to work within genre without finding themselves beholden to a limited set of typologies. Harold is very much the gangster made good, and there is the henchman (Razors), the bent copper, the moll (played by Helen Mirren), the second-in-command who betrays him. But the bent copper isn’t just a type here, he is also someone who, from his perspective, is doing a good job. When he speaks to Harold about the calm of the last decade, he says it is all thanks to H — but there is self-congratulation in his remarks as well. He has been working with Harold for ten years, keeping the peace. The officer doesn’t see himself as the bent copper of the genre, but the wise pragmatist who finds the best way to keep everything functioning smoothly, and he isn’t wrong. If the gang world is scared of Harold, and the cop can make sure H does lots of the policing for him, where is the problem if he gets some back-handers? Equally, Mirren’s moll Victoria isn’t the one-dimensional figure standing by her man and getting the back of his hand. She is an important part of the operation, vital to Harold’s sanity and his status. 

     Early on, Victoria speaks fluent French to the chef on the boat, and later explains to Harry why she has been open with Charlie about what has been going on. Harold quickly realises what she says makes sense. Late in the film, Harold pushes her aggressively down on the couch, and rather than Harold forcing Victoria to know her place, he quickly realises how misplaced his anger happens to be. When Victoria turns away and starts to cry, it reflects the tension they have both been feeling as the violence escalates and they come to see their lives are in danger. Mirren talked about the original script showing a much less developed Victoria, and saw a great film with a weak female lead. “She was basically the girlfriend in the corner, and I wanted to bring her into the story. So I signed up with great alacrity and excitement, with the caveat that I wanted to change Victoria…" Mirren adds, she was "the kind of girl who might have grown up in a nice house in Kingston. Not posh-posh. Maybe her dad was a very successful car dealer. She is smart and intelligent. She brings class to Harold’s operation, and he needs her.” (Guardian) 

            With the plausible motivations of the cop, the complexity of Victoria, the presence of the IRA and the story predicated on the Docklands development, as it shows several scenes in the area, the film arrives at what might seem a contradiction in terms: generic realism. Yet it was far from alone, as many films of the 70s and into the 80s showed an interest in what could seem like tired tropes, yet reinvigorated by socio-political concerns and/or an exploration of milieux. While The Long Goodbye insisted on exploring contemporary LA almost to the detriment of the story it was telling, Chinatown delved into LA’s past to set the story amidst the developing city and its water supply. The latter is far from historically accurate, but it nevertheless gives to the fiction an added socio-political texture, which in turn adds greatly to the intricacy of the plot. Chinatown might have become a standard work of pastiche were it not for screenwriter Robert Towne’s interest in exploring how a city in the midst of the desert gets its water supply. The Long Good Friday, like Get Carter, isn’t too far removed from kitchen sink realism in Get Carter’s case, and the post-kitchen sink films of the late seventies and early eighties in The Long Good Friday’s. Most kitchen sink works were set in the Midlands or the north of England (Derby, Nottingham, Manchester) and Get Carter offers a residue of this regional flavour in a story about a London-based character returning to Newcastle to find out about his brother’s death. The Long Good Friday was part of a realism based based further south and often in and around London: films like Meantime, Made in Britain, Rude Boy, Giro City and Babylon. They were produced with the hovering presence of Thatcher, and though she remains unnamed here, it is surely her spirit that Harold channels when he wants to revitalise the British economy. “Shand is perhaps the first truly Thatcherite antihero of British cinema” (BFI) Lou Thomas proposes, a claim made all the more viable with the film making the most of its Docklands location, as Thatcher would do likewise as she helped turn the area into the financial capital of Europe.  ‘"If you want a physical reminder of the change under Thatcher, Canary Wharf is a very good example: when she came along they were derelict docks,’ said Charles Moore, the author of Margaret Thatcher's authorized biography and former editor of the Daily Telegraph.” (Reuters) 

      Without this concern over the potential development of the Docklands area, without creating characters who have complex and individual motivations and emotions, and without the presence of the IRA capable of upsetting Harold’s plans as no crime organisation could have, the film would have been unlikely to have stood the test of time. It has stood that test by incorporating its moment. When Harold, Victoria and Charlie drive to the traditional pub where they will have lunch, we see the bomb going off just as they arrive at their destination. This is technically skilful filmmaking that incorporated realism of its own as the actors didn’t know exactly when the explosion would take place. But McKenzie would also have been aware that it would conjure up images not just from films but from life, and from photographs covering the aftermath of various IRA attacks on pubs in Guildford and Birmingham only a few years before.  When the film shows us Victoria and Harold helping others out of the pub amidst the wreckage, it well knows this is a trauma that goes beyond the immediate shock of a film image. 

         What we can take away from the film is how realism needn’t only be anti-generic in its determination to show as much as possible real life in the raw, with Bazin claiming, “the assemblage of film must never add anything to the existing reality.” ('De Sica: Metteur en scene’) Genre filmmaking can very much add to that reality as it combines established codes with attention to the societal and the characterisationally complex. The Long Good Friday is one such film, as good an example as any of the ‘Gangster as Tragic Hero,‘ when Robert Warshow says of this figure: “this is our intolerable dilemma: that failure is a kind of death and success is evil and dangerous, is—ultimately—impossible. The effect of the gangster film is to embody this dilemma in the person of the gangster and resolve it by his death. The dilemma is resolved because it is his death, not ours. We are safe; for the moment, we can acquiesce in our failure, we can choose to fail.”

    Harold is its embodiment, and his failure became Thatcher’s success as the film asks us to see the tragic hero’s fall. Yet Harold's is very much a tragedy of our time, a figure blind to the events that have recently taken place in Ireland but astute to the possibilities in front of him if he can gain funding for the development of his project. Looking at the film years after it was made can make it seem more tragic still for Harold, with many, many millions being made in what was then disused land and warehouses. Some might insist that such ruminations have no place in how we perceive the film, but let us claim it is a vital aspect of its retrospective perception. The film, like Harold, was well aware this was prime real estate in the making, even if the film explores much more the undoing of Harold, just at the moment when the boy from Stepney looked like he could have gone on to become the king of Canary Wharf.


© Tony McKibbin