Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		3.0
Audio		3.5
Extras		0.5
Overall		3.5

The Long Good Friday Blu-ray Movie Review

The Revelation of St. Hoskins and the Quintessential British Crime Drama

Reviewed by Casey Broadwater August 20, 2010

British gangster films are ten a penny, but the great ones—movies with a unique take on the genre— are few and far between. Films like Get Carter (the Michael Caine version, not the blah Stallone remake), The Krays, Sexy Beast, and Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, which, for all its stylistic excesses, is undeniably original. For a more recent entry, check out the ultra-violent true crime comedy Bronson, driven by rising-star actor Tom Hardy’s deliriously over-the-top portrayal of England’s most expensive—and deranged—criminal. No top-10 list of British gangster dramas would be complete, however, without director John Mackenzie’s The Long Good Friday, a rock-solid entry that introduced the world to actor Bob Hoskins, who would soon become one of the genre’s most recognizable faces. The film is less flashy than many of its successors, but it’s grounded, gritty, and features some terrific performances.

Hoskins plays Harold Shand, the top man on the totem pole of London’s crime scene. He’s got a shady empire referred to as “the corporation,” and legions of goons working beneath him, but there comes a time in every gangster’s life when he yearns to be respectable. In Harold’s case, he’s working on a semi-legitimate land deal that would revitalize London’s industrial docklands in time for the 1988 Olympics. Semi-legitimate, because he’s got a city councilman in his pocket, a corrupt cop feeding him intel, and he’s courting the monetary assistance of Charlie (Eddie Constantine), a big-wig American Mafioso who has come to London with his lawyer to make sure Harold is on the up-and-up. It’s key, then, that Harold make a good showing, so he holds a party for his financial backers on his massive luxury yacht, where he schmoozes and delivers a rousing monologue about how it’s important for “the right people to mastermind the New London.” Clearly, he sees himself as one of the right people. Only, he can’t quite escape his criminal past. In a single day, one of his trusted associates is killed in a locker room, his mother’s car is blown up outside a Good Friday church service, and a bomb reduces his favorite pub to smithereens. Someone is out to get him, obviously, but Harold has no idea who, or why.

We’re confused too, initially at least. Director John Mackenzie makes the first act deliberately disorienting, dropping us into the action with no explanations or exposition. In the first ten minutes—which are nearly free of dialogue—we see some kind of cash transaction gone bad, a gangster rubbing another man’s thigh in a pub, and a mourning woman spitting in the face of Jeff (Derek Thompson), Harold’s right hand man. None of this makes any real sense, at first, but Mackenzie is just giving us the puzzle pieces that he’ll help us assemble later. The Long Good Friday is as much of a whydunit as a whodunit, and as the film moves toward its conclusion, it offers several clever misdirects and satisfying reveals.

To say more would spoil the mystery, but the story is really secondary to the film’s study of Harold’s character. The situations that Harold finds himself in throughout his long Good Friday serve not just to advance the plot but also to open up his psyche, letting us probe the mind of a gangster who wants to make good. Hoskins in simply brilliant here; his Harold is a lion one minute—hanging mobsters upside down by meat hooks to extract confessions and jabbing one trusted underling in the throat with a jagged broken bottle—and a lamb the next, sobbing in the shower while he scrubs off the blood. In one of the film’s best scenes, we see him fly into a rage at his girlfriend Victoria (the dependably sexy and intelligent Helen Mirren), and then collapse into a genuine apology, seemingly terrified of his own impulses. Harold is conflicted, torn between his desire to go clean and his criminal urges, and watching Bob Hoskins tear through this bipolar balancing act is the film’s greatest pleasure.

In many ways, The Long Good Friday seems stodgily conventional and even visually bland, especially in comparison to later crime moves, but crackerjack pacing and a thematic undercurrent of religious symbolism easily make up for these faults. Mackenzie is great at allowing long stretches of tension to explode in a moment of unexpected violence—see the grisly broken bottle scene—and despite the sometimes muddled storytelling, the film coasts on a gripping what’s gonna happen next vibe. Most compelling, though, is the way Barrie Keefe’s script sets up Harold as a simultaneous Christ/Anti-Christ figure of sorts, a man of violence who has struggled to keep the peace within the London crime world, who is betrayed by his own Judas, and who suffers for his vision of a “New London.” The film could’ve been called The Passion of the Mob Boss. Throughout we see allusions to crucifixion, from the gangsters hanging upside down in a meat locker to a man literally nailed through the palms to the floor. The symbolism adds another dimension to the film, but there’s no grim self-seriousness here. If anything, the film is bleakly funny, and Hoskins, with his diamond-tongued Cockney swagger, gets some great lines. (Like “I’m setting up the biggest deal in Europe with the hardest organization since Hitler stuck a swastika on his jockstrap,” or “The Yanks love snobbery. They really feel they've arrived in England if the upper class treats 'em like shit.”) The Long Good Friday may be a meat and potatoes crime drama, but it’s certainly satisfying. Oh, and look out for a cameo by an extremely young Pierce Brosnan in his first film appearance.

The Long Good Friday Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

After a Criterion release from way back in 1999, an Anchor Bay DVD in 2006, and a Blu-ray released in the U.K. with some cropping issues, The Long Good Friday makes it to Blu-ray in the U.S. with a 1080p/AVC-encoded transfer, framed in a screen-filling 1.78:1 aspect ratio. Like the other HandMade titles that Image is releasing on the 24th, this one sits on a single-layer, 25 GB Blu-ray disc, and while there's a definite leap in clarity and color from standard definition releases, the film would certainly look better if given a proper—that is, expensive and unlikely—restoration. The movie was a fairly low budgeted production to begin with, so it's never going to look as sharp and pristine as more mainstream titles from the late '70s and early '80s, but there's definitely room for improvement. Although much of the film has a soft, slightly hazy look, there's an appreciable upgrade in overall clarity here—especially in close-ups—and the movie's natural filmic texture is intact, with no DNR abuses. There are several scenes that look outright blurry, but we can presume this is due to slightly off focusing and not any problem with the transfer. Skin tones can look quite ruddy—then again, this might just be the boozy complexions of some of the actors—but color is otherwise well balanced and, for the most part, realistic. I did, however, notice some strange color/brightness fluctuations, most apparent during the scene where Howard is pouring a Bloody Mary for Victoria. Black levels are strong during the daytime scenes, but at night the image often takes on a grayish, gritty quality, mostly because these sequences spike in both grain and compression noise. There's a lot of wobble and judder during the opening credits, but thankfully this goes away once the movie actually begins. Overall, this is a middling transfer—a better bit-rate and a larger file size might help a little—but this also the best that the film has looked on home video thus far.

The Long Good Friday Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The Long Good Friday features a lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track, but I wouldn't call this a real surround mix. It sounds to me like the original 2.0 audio elements were just bled into the surround channels to make a 5.1 presentation. If you listen carefully in the rear speakers, you'll hear almost exactly what you hear from the front channels—dialogue and all—only quieter. So, don't expect any cross-channel movements or directional precision. To be honest, I'd prefer a lossless 2.0 mix. Still, the expansion does work in some ways, filling out the soundfield with ambience, like pub chatter and water splashing sounds at the pool. Francis Monkman's synthesizer-tinged score is the most intense thing about this track and it sounds great, with plenty of punch and only a few moments of shrillness —the strings can be overly piercing. Dialogue is easy to understand throughout—well, as easy as Cockney accents can be to understand—and unlike previous releases, English subtitles are available.

The Long Good Friday Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

While the 2006 Anchor Bay DVD release of the film contained a commentary by director John Mackenzie and an hour-long documentary, the sole piece of supplementary material on this disc is a theatrical trailer (SD, 2:42).

The Long Good Friday Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

A successor to American gangster flicks from earlier in the century and a predecessor of the British cinematic crime wave that was to come, The Long Good Friday is a meat and potatoes mob movie elevated by religious symbolism and a dynamic performance by Bob Hoskins in his breakout role. Its impact has been slightly dulled in the intervening years since its release—mostly because, for a while, it seemed like the crime caper was the default British film genre—but The Long Good Friday is still a hell of a good time. This is a spartan release, with no special features to speak of and a mediocre video transfer, but it still comes recommended, especially considering its attractively low price point.