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The Long Good Friday (1980): The perfect film for, er, Good Friday
There are almost no films which take place on Good Friday.
Most of them involve Christianity in some form or another and, considering what Good Friday is all about, that’s probably fair enough.
But there is a film with no theological connotations about it at all, the plot of which unfolds over the period of a single Good Friday, and — considering the vast majority of people looking at Medium are from the United States — it’s probably a film which is not that well known.
That’s a shame because The Long Good Friday is completely and utterly brilliant.
The British gangster film genre is a crowded one, and it’s a genre which features some motion pictures of very questionable quality.
The gold standard is the original Get Carter and its modern successors Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch. They’re all great.
At the other end of the spectrum are countless efforts which are all more or less cut from the same cloth in terms of style points — scowling characters, a main cast comprised of around half a dozen of the same actors, frequent use of the c-bomb, highly gratuitous violence and a total absence of nuance.
Some of these are watchable (The Business), some are hilarious (We Still Kill The Old Way), but most are just pretty bad. I won’t name them here because some people like them, and that’s fine, your personal taste is nobody else’s concern.
The Long Good Friday, though, is watchable, hilarious (at times — “that’s dignified isn’t it, going out like a Raspberry Ripple”), and countless other adjectives. Don’t just take my word for it, Ebert says it is “a masterful and very tough piece of filmmaking”. He also says:
This movie is one amazing piece of work, not only for the Hoskins performance but also for the energy of the filmmaking, the power of the music, and, oddly enough, for the engaging quality of its sometimes very violent sense of humor.
So, yeah, it’s great. As soon as you hear the evocative them music, you know you’re in for a treat.
The combination of sinister-sounding synths and seedy saxophone does immediately date The Long Good Friday but…
