‘Bob Hoskins knew his share of villains’: How The Long Good Friday put the frighteners on Britain

Bob Hoskins had a desperate, vodka-sozzled idea to save The Long Good Friday. He knew a geezer who would bump off showbiz impresario Lew Grade for £10,000.  

Grade’s production company, Black Lion Films, had financed the crime classic, which was shot in the summer of 1979. But the money men lost their nerve over its gangster vs IRA violence. Grade’s company wanted to chop the film down, sell it to television, and dub Hoskins’ voice so it was more palatable for the American audience. A diabolical liberty, as Hoskins’ kingpin-turned-capitalist, Harold Shand, might say.  

It was almost two years before the filmmakers got The Long Good Friday out of the company’s hands and into cinemas. “We had a terrible battle with those b-------,” said director John Mackenzie. The film is now available on limited edition 4K Blu-ray from Arrow Video. 

There are many, many colourful stories behind The Long Good Friday. Most involve the blustering charisma of Bob Hoskins. For author Robert Sellers, Hoskins’ most desperate moment, suggesting they bump off the bigwig, is the best of the lot. Sellers details the battle to release The Long Good Friday in his book, Very Naughty Boys, about the George Harrison-owned HandMade Films, which ultimately bought and saved The Long Good Friday.  

As screenwriter Barrie Keeffe told Sellers, the four filmmakers were sitting in their Carnaby Street office – Hoskins, Keeffe, Mackenzie, and producer Barry Hanson – exhausted and glum. It was Christmas, and the sound of carols drifted in from outside. Hoskins swigged vodka with two poodles sat on his lap. When he suggested they could “wipe out” Grade for £2,500 each, Hanson said another member of Grade’s family might just take his place. “All right then,” said Hoskins, “five grand each.”  

Actor Derek Thompson, who played Jeff – smarmy consigliere to Hoskins’ crime boss – laughs at hearing the tale. Thompson went on to play Charlie Fairhead in Casualty and now appears in the second series of the BBC’s Belfast police drama, Blue Lights. He heard plenty of Hoskins stories, too. “They’re all true!” he says. “They all verified. There was a magnetism about him. He attracted strange circumstances.”  

He adds: “I heard that Hoskins nicked the master print and went up and down the streets of Soho hawking it to people, trying to sell the film.”

It sounds as if there was a touch of Harold Shand in the real man. And unsurprisingly, perhaps: there’s rarely been a better piece of casting. “Actor and role instantly connected,” says Sellers. “Growing up in a tough London neighbourhood, Hoskins knew his fair share of villains and is a revelation.” 

Flanked by posh, whip-smart Victoria – played by Helen Mirren – Harold Shand is a boy from Stepney done good. “I’m not a politician,” he claims. “I’m a businessman with a sense of history. And I’m also a Londoner.” But more importantly a man of the moment: the spirit of Thatcherism made manifest – emboldened by free enterprise, puffed up on national pride.  

Margaret Thatcher’s government had come to power just before filming started. Shand anticipates the 1980s’ lust for wealth and prosperity, the self-interest and excess. He is, says Robert Sellers, “the bastard offspring of Margaret Thatcher and Al Capone”.  

The Long Good Friday is prescient to the point of being prophetic. Shand’s plans to go semi-legit by redeveloping London Docklands in a “hands across the ocean” deal with the American Mafia – with an eye on putting the 1988 Olympics at the heart of his capitalist takeover of east London. But, while Shand tried to schmooze the Mafia over Easter weekend, the IRA target him with a series of bombs and murders.  

According to Barrie Keeffe, The Long Good Friday was inspired by various things: anger, boredom, and a dissatisfaction with British gangster films. The idea began as “a Humphrey Bogart film if he’d been a cockney” and developed into “terrorism vs gangsterism” after a night of drinking in a north London Irish pub. This came soon after the 1970s peak of the IRA bombings in England. Keeffe saw a band play rebel songs and burn the Union Jack on stage. Keeffe was warned to keep his mouth shut, lest he give away his London accent. 

The first draft – called The Paddy Factor – was written, rather fittingly, over Easter. “I always find that holiday kind of boring,” Keeffe would say. “Four days of nothing.”   

The eventual film’s most recognisable IRA man is played by future 007 Pierce Brosnan. He uses his boyish good looks to lure in Shand’s gay best pal, Colin (Paul Freeman) then stabs him to death – one of the attacks that kicks off the carnage. Harold is outraged by the sheer brass neck of the murder. “Colin never hurt a fly! Well, only when it was necessary.” When Colin’s body is discreetly carted off in an ice cream van, Shand drops one of his quotable cockney corkers: “There’s a lot of dignity in that, int there? Going out like a raspberry ripple”.  

Forty-five years on, Shand’s cockney-isms feel like the entire basis for Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels – and every cockney-barrel-of-monkeys Brit-flick since.  

Keeffe – also a playwright and journalist – drew on his real-life brushes with the London underworld. In one of the film’s most frighteningly violent reprisals, a gang member is nailed to a warehouse floor – a real-life punishment for entering another gang’s territory. As an 18-year-old reporter for the Stratford Express, Keeffe had interviewed the victim of one such gangland crucifixion. “Just put it down to a do-it-yourself accident,” said the bandaged-up victim from his hospital bed, in a nod-nod, wink-wink, say-no-more sort of way.  

Keeffe once had a near-miss moment himself with Ronnie Kray – in the toilet of a Bethnal Green pub. Ronnie stood next to Keeffe at the urinal and asked, “What do you think of this?” Keeffe – fearing Ronnie’s sexual advances – did as he was told and peered down to look at whatever Ronnie had produced from his trousers. Keeffe was relieved to see a gun.  

Keeffe’s own creation, Harold Shand, is a generation on from the Krays. There have been “10 years of peace” under his gangland rule. Shand is prone to earthy nostalgia on the rough-and-ready corners of London (“It used to be a nice street, this. Decent families, no scum”) but he’s a modern sort of gangster. His outfit isn’t a gang, not even a firm, but a “corporation” – one built on greasy backhanders, corrupt officials, and sweeping the dirty dealings under the rug. “We can’t have bombs going off, Harold,” says his go-to bent copper. “We can’t have corpses.”  The copper is more worried about the appearance of crime than the reality of it. 

Like so much great art from early 1980s Britain, The Long Good Friday is an artefact of its cultural, political, and economic moment – potent with the mood of the time. As Derek Thompson says, this isn’t a Dick Van Dyke version of London: “I think it was Barrie Keeffe’s idea. That it shouldn’t play to the American market by giving you the antique notion of London with red buses and taxi drivers saying, ‘Two bob, guvnor... you’re a right toff, you are.’” 

For Harold Shand, Britain has a prosperous future as a leading European state – there’s a whole continent’s worth of cash out there for the taking. “These people deserve something better than this,” says Shand, looking at a rundown London neighbourhood. But Shand mistakes decency for wealth – he sees London as pure commodity. “No other city in the world has got, right in its centre, such an opportunity for profitable progress,” he says in a rousing speech to his consortium of investors. It’s a call for the hungriest capitalists to invest in what he calls “new London”, while he stands aboard his yacht, framed by Tower Bridge. It’s the film’s one touristy indulgence: an icon of totemic British pride.  

An essay by Mark Duguid, included with the Arrow Video set, notes how the film shows two sides to London: the boozers, derelict docks, and stinking abattoir; and the luxury of Shand’s new London, seen in the casinos, high-end restaurants, and Harold’s yacht. It’s a conflict between the places when the villains do the nasty end of their work and the counterfeit opulence of their success.   

There exists a similar conflict in Harold Shand himself. His new London self is on the surface – an on-the-pulse businessman, all Man from Del Monte suits and grandiose patter – but the old school gangster rages beneath: a bullish force of ever-ratcheting fury, always threatening to erupt and consume the more presentable version. “He could almost look down the camera and frighten you,” says Thompson. The brilliance of Hoskins’ performance is that he has total command over both halves of Harold Shand. 

When the filmmakers pitched the film to Hoskins, he was in a very unlikely London location: the Hospital for Tropical Diseases. Hoskins was about to literally squeeze out a 26ft tapeworm that he’d picked up while shooting Zulu Dawn in South Africa. Other versions of the story say it was 27ft long. Or even 35ft. “That tapeworm always puts on a foot every time I hear that story,” John Mackenzie told Neon magazine in a 1999 retrospective.  

Robert Sellers describes Hoskins as “blasting through every scene like an Exocet missile”. Hoskins’ creative energy behind-the-scenes was much the same. He fired off so many ideas, so rapidly, that the filmmakers sent him on a holiday to Greece to get rid of him. On another occasion, Hoskins locked Keeffe in their office overnight to make sure that he cracked on with the rewrites. “But the lovely thing was that he came back and posted two packets of cigarettes through the letterbox to keep me going,” Keeffe recalled.   

On set, Hoskins was the guv’nor of wind-ups. Derek Thompson recalls him telling another actor that they were using “suppository microphones” for one scene because – so Hoskins claimed – you get better audio from inside the actors’ rectums. The sound crew cottoned onto the gag and turned up one morning with a tampon, modified with a mini mic head, asking for volunteers to give the device a blast.   

Just as crucial to the film is Helen Mirren as Victoria. Forget Harold’s yacht or HS-emblazoned kimono. Victoria is his most valuable asset. While Shand charges around London, trying to sort out the IRA, it’s Victoria’s job to sweet-talk the Americans and generally keep a lid on his mess. The only person Victorian can’t charm is Harold’s salt-of-the-earth mother.  

The character, says Robert Sellers, is “almost Lady Macbeth to Hoskins’ Scottish king”. She was originally written as a standard, on-the-sidelines gangster’s moll – largely ineffective, with a mouthful of rotten teeth. Mackenzie and Mirren fleshed out the character but didn’t always agree. “I didn’t want to be a stereotype,” Mirren later said. “I argued every line.”  

“During shooting Mackenzie had a few clashes with the actress, who wanted to make Victoria the equal of Shand, going out and blasting the bad guys,” says Sellers. Shand, however, is more creative than just blasting away his enemies. In the film’s most memorable moment of gangland thuggery, he rounds up rival gangsters and hangs them upside down in an abattoir. They’re left to dangle in the cold until someone spills the beans on who’s targeting him. “Frostbite or verbals,” Harold demands. British gangster films have tried to top the menace of that scene for 45 years – not a single one has managed it so far.  

The scenes were filmed in a working Jewish abattoir, where animals were hung up and bled out. There was also a glue factory across the yard, where the carcasses were melted down. Mackenzie claimed that he could still smell the stink of it 20 years later.  

“It was f------ cold!” says Derek Thompson. “That’s why I was wearing my big coat. I brought that in. All the guys in two-piece suits were thinking, why didn’t I bring my scarf?!”  Sellers’ book notes that one of the villains almost fainted from being hung upside down. Ladders were brought in so they could be let off the hook, literally, between takes.  

Thompson laughs at the suggestion that there were a few cockney villains among the supporting cast. “They were all cockney villains!” he says. The villains – brought in via Keeffe’s connections – offered pointers. “John – not that I’ve ever done it,” they’d say to the director, “but if you’re gonna stab someone you wouldn’t do it like that.”  

Thompson’s character, Jeff, suffers the worst of the violence. Jeff’s fate is inevitable from the moment he makes a move on Victoria. “I want to lick every inch of you,” he says – a clear sign that he’s about to come unstuck. “That line is such a bullseye,” says Thompson.  

Jeff is educated – but not from the school of hard knocks – and too cocksure. He’s brimming with a kind of ambition that’s bound to get him killed. Thompson describes how he acted with his shoulders: Jeff literally bigs himself up in front of Shand – bragging that he’s cool because he’s “on the winning side” – but droops once Shand’s back is turned. He only gets tasty when their enemies are already tied up, hanging upside down. 

When Jeff confesses that he’s to blame for the IRA attacks, Shand stabs a broken bottle into Jeff’s jugular – a moment of such harrowing violence that even Shand is caught off guard. Jeff dies in his arms, blood spewing from his neck. An on-set medic advised that Thompson should convulse, which would happen for real. “It was suggested that you’d go into uncontrollable tremors,” Thompson says. “It feels appropriate and all the more pathetic.”  

An earlier version had Shand pulling two swords of the yacht’s bulkhead and cutting off Jeff’s head. “That was the plan!” says Thompson. “It was great stuff to read – Harold threw up his arms up, grabbed these crossed sabres, one in each hand. He swiped with one, then the other, and took the head clean off. But John and Barrie thought it brutalized Hoskins.”  

The tube used to spurt blood didn’t work at first, so they filmed the scene over and again, soiling the wardrobe’s supply of shirts with fake claret. “Eventually they were knocking on doors, saying, ‘Have you got any white shirts with a 16-inch collar? We’ve got through the 40 we brought!’” Thompson missed seeing The Police in concert because he’d left his ticket in one of the shirts, and it got soaked with the blood. “I’ve still got it as a souvenir,” he says.   

The sequence says more about Harold Shand than just his capacity for violence. It’s not the betrayal that fuels his rage, but Jeff’s suggestion that Harold’s not big enough to take on the IRA – that he’ll have to share London with them. “It’s my manor!” Shand barks.  

The IRA’s campaign even gives the Mafia the jitters, which – to Shand – marks the Americans as lacking the requisite drive, vitality, and Dunkirk spirit. Shand’s nationalism isn’t meant to be celebrated, but you can’t help feeling a twinkle of British pride when he gives the American Mafioso verbals. “The Mafia? I’ve s--- ‘em!”  

The most iconic moment comes immediately after. Shand is surprised by IRA kidnappers and carted away – to be killed, presumably – in his own car. The camera stays on Hoskins, with only one cut, for a minute and a half, as Francis Monkman’s Sweeney-esque theme blares out. Pierce Brosnan sits opposite with a gun, though they never met – their shots had to be filmed separately. What Hoskins conveys in that shot, acting with his bottom teeth alone in some moments, is masterful. Harold’s been had and he knows it. He’s almost impressed. “That’s him saying, ‘F------ well done, I couldn’t have thought of that myself,’” says Thompson. “That’s why he’s a great actor. You wouldn’t normally take that from a script.” There was talk of a sequel, in which it would be revealed that Shand had escaped. What a mistake it would have been to strip that final scene of its power and uncertainty.  

The IRA story made Lew Grade’s company nervous, though the filmmakers later discovered it wasn’t Grade himself (he actually liked the film) but Grade’s “henchmen”. They called it IRA propaganda and feared the IRA would bomb cinemas. Keeffe argued, “Well, wait a minute, if it’s IRA propaganda, why are they going to blow up your cinemas showing it?’” Grade’s henchman snapped back, “Don’t get f------ intellectual with me!”  

Hoskins and Mirren championed it at film festivals. According to Very Naughty Boys, it was Monty Python’s Eric Idle who saw it and recommended that HandMade Films (which had produced Life of Brian) should pick it up for distribution. HandMade bought The Long Good Friday for £700,000 – £200,000 less than its budget.  “Ironically, George Harrison, the co-founder of HandMade and ex-Beatle, hated the film and was upset they’d bought it,” says Sellers. “He thought it was too violent.”  

Released in February 1981, The Long Good Friday was a hit. “It was so popular that touts operated in the West End selling tickets for double the price and later even bootleg videos,” adds Sellers.   

Between its behind-the-scenes stories, the sheer force of Hoskins’ performance, and its continuing political resonance, it’s hard to see The Long Good Friday as anything but one of the greatest British films of all time – if not the greatest.   

And Harold Shand’s plans were on the money. London Docklands was redeveloped – and partly on dodgy money. As seen in last year’s BBC drama, The Gold, the spoils of the £26 million Brink’s-Mat were laundered through investment in London Docklands. And East London really did host the Olympics – though 24 years later than Shand imagined it would.  

In the book Ghost Milk, East London writer Iain Sinclair likens Shand’s new London to the real-life regeneration of Stratford for the 2012 Olympics, which Sinclair slates for bulldozing through the community for corporate interests and profit. Shand would have surely basked in the 2012 opening ceremony and the sense of national pride it inspired – on home turf, no less. Shand might feel the same about the rest of London, where every derelict warehouse and unused spot of wasteland has been snapped up by money-ravenous developers.  

Harold Shand was more than a harbinger of 1980s Thatcherism – but the next 45 years to come. Seen from that perspective, The Long Good Friday is a fight for the soul of Britain. “But mainly,” says Derek Thompson, “it was just a f------ great gangster film.” 

The Long Good Friday is available now on 4K UHD Blu-ray from Arrow Video