A little bit more than a ’ot dog

I've put money in all your pockets. 

I've treated you well, even when you was out of order, right?! 

One lunchtime, not so long ago (actually, quite some time ago, in the days when there were things called offices) and when I had a job near London’s Tower Bridge, I left my desk to go for a stroll around the historic backstreets of Wapping. What began as a cathartic midday plod in the late summer sunshine soon became a literal walk down Memory Lane, as I mooched about streets I hadn’t visited in 30 years, not since the days when I had to visit the offices of The Sun and Sunday Times while working for Sky TV. 

Rupert Murdoch had, not long before I joined Sky, decamped his newspapers from Fleet Street to ‘Fortress Wapping’, a divisive move that changed British newspaper publishing forever, as the tycoon belligerently took on the print unions in an acrimonious and, at times, violent period of media history. Like much of Wapping, the area around News International’s site at the junction of Virginia and Pennington streets had once been staunch working class, populated by dockers and their families. Today, Murdoch's presence is long gone, with the newspaper industry undergoing further schism in the online age (with News International losing, along the way, the News Of The World, a victim of its own dubious practice).

Walking back to St. Katherine’s Dock, which my then-office overlooked, I ambled close to the river on Wapping High Street. Making a turn, I found myself in Scandrett Street, where I was confronted by a typical canyon of newish brick buildings, designed to resemble the warehouses that once lined the area, and now a testament to rampant gentrification. It was then that it struck me that this was precisely the vision that fictional mobster Harold Shand had had at the end of the 1970s when he had the idea to do something about the dilapidated streets of E1. 

This, then, is the basis of The Long Good Friday, one of the finest British films ever made, and which was released 40 years ago this week. “This is the decade in which London will become Europe's capital, having cleared away the out-dated,” Shand pronounces on the deck of his gleaming yacht, moored in front of the Tower of London, as he tries to convince an American mafia delegation to come in on his project to regenerate the East End. “We've got mile after mile or acre after acre of land for our future prosperity,” he continues. “No other city in the world has got, right at its centre, such an opportunity for profitable progress.” He was incredibly prophetic. After decades of post-war wrangling about what to do with the area, in the same year that The Long Good Friday was released, Michael Heseltine created the London Docklands Development Corporation. By the end of the 80s and the start of the 90s, Docklands itself was transformed. Post-Big Bang, the banks and their bankers moved east. Canary Wharf was built on the Isle of Dogs, and continues to grow to this day, with gleaming spire after gleaming spire springing up like cocktail sticks planted on a Cream Cracker. Today it might be quieter due to the lack of office workers, but it is no less a powerful symbol of the economic aspiration that stretches out of several boroughs spreading east down the Thames from Tower Bridge.

But back to Scandrett Street, which plays a notorious role in The Long Good Friday: as I stood there, staring at faux history clad in modernity, I felt a shiver of familiarity, despite having never been in that place before. Opposite the new developments was a wrought iron fence surrounding the garden of St. John’s Church. For East End authenticity, it could have been Albert Square itself, but something told me that I had seen that fence in some other context. Sometime later, reading up on the production of The Long Good Friday, I discovered what had been there before - at the end of that street (and now long gone, the result of modernistic development) was The Lion & Unicorn pub, the East End boozer blown up by - at the outset of the film - hoodlums on Good Friday.

The John Mackenzie-directed thriller remains one of the greatest British films ever made, but its use of London locations, in particular, made it so rich. It was also uncompromising. Appearing a year or so after the comedic Minder arrived on British TV screens, itself a distant descendent from The Sweeney, and around the same time that Only Fools And Horses made its debut, The Long Good Friday was an equally colourful depiction of shady London life, but with an infinitely deeper agenda. Barrie Keefe’s bristling story combined IRA terrorism, a mafia plot, a prototype yuppie (in Shand) before the term had ever been used, and was populated with a cast of cracking British talent. 

Bob Hoskins remains throughout a mesmerising, Napoleonic figure, with his boxer’s nose and street-smart belligerence, trying to understand who and why anyone would be trying to derail his grand vision, unaware that one of his gang has become embroiled in a dodgy deal with terrorists in Belfast, who exact their revenge on Shand’s empire in startling form. Shand’s quotes throughout the film are legend, especially the “I’ve put money in all your pockets!” near-soliloquy at the top of this post, but also his admonishment of the American mafiosi as they renege on their agreement inside The Savoy hotel: “What I’m looking for is someone who can contribute to what England has given to the world: culture, sophistication, genius. A little bit more than a ’ot dog, know what I mean?” he quips, with tongue not entirely in cheek. “I’m glad I found out in time just what a partnership with a pair of wankers like you would’ve been,” he thunders on, probably not grasping the fact that Americans wouldn’t know what sort of an insult that was.

Critics have tried to analyse The Long Good Friday, even attempting to make parallels to The Godfather, given both films’ levels of brutality and their central figures of gangsters trying to change their business models. Like Mario Puzo’s somewhat Shakespearian tragedy, quintessentially a New York tale, The Long Good Friday is pure London, as the list of filming locations pertains. Nothing has come close since, not Guy Ritchie’s geezerfests or anything in Danny Dyer’s canon. It works because London’s Docklands were bleak at the beginning of the 1980s and, even now, if you look closely, still are. It’s just that the converted warehouses that line the river, housing London’s new urban elite, have given it a respectable polish, the kind of aspiration that Shand himself had envisioned. Paul Barber (who played ‘Errol the Ponce’, mutilated in his kitchen by Shand henchman 'Razors'), this week likened Hoskins’ character to the principle character in Only Fools And Horses, in which he also appeared: “The thing that got me was Harold’s speech on the boat [at St. Katherine’s Dock],” Barber told The Guardian this week. “Think about it now: it has all happened. It was the Thatcher era and he was like the young Del Boy.”

“Nobody had done a movie like that as far as I can recollect,” Helen Mirren, who played Shand’s moll-like wife Victoria, also told The Guardian. “It broke ground,” she said, saying that she was blown away from the outset by Keefe’s script. “It was like a piece of literature, and movie scripts don’t tend to be like that. This one you read like a novel. With the exception that my female character was terrible – she was very, very dull.” That may have been the case - and I’m sure Mirren wouldn’t deny that Victoria serves as little more than window dressing to the piece - but the film is certainly novel-like, as Shand questions why things are going increasingly wrong with his grand plan. And, of course, it ends so brilliantly without conclusion: as Shand exits The Savoy for a rendezvous with Victoria, he jumps into his chauffeur-driven ride, only to see his wife being hauled off in the opposite direction under duress. As he realises the unfolding situation, a figure - Pierce Brosnan in his film debut - pops up in the front seat wielding a silenced pistol. Much like the final scene of The Sopranos, it’s up to you to decide what happens next. But whereas Tony Soprano’s fate is subtly ambiguous, the elongated closing sequence of The Long Good Friday, set to Francis Monkman’s driving score, sees Shand gazing out of the Jag’s window, seemingly accepting his fate.

It was, without doubt, the film that planted Hoskins in our consciousness. He’d made his breakthrough a couple of years before in the BBC’s adaptation of Dennis Potter's Pennies From Heaven, and he would sort of return to the Shand character five years later in Mona Lisa. In The Long Good Friday, Hoskins is the focal point of a fascinating essay about Britain at the beginning of the 1980s. Keefe has appeared to shy away from casting it as a great sociological snapshot, with director Mackenzie calling it just “a damned good gangster movie”. But 40 years on, as we address many contemporary issues about morality, race and even patriotism, The Long Good Friday holds up on so many levels, not the least being that it’s British film making at its very best.