'The Long Good Friday' Revisited

There���s now a cleaned-up version of the 1979-80 London gangster film ���The Long Good Friday��� (largely made in London in 1979, released quite a bit later) which (once again) I���ve been lucky enough to see on a full-size screen but which is also available on DVD and no doubt other forms of modern technology for those who care. It���s surprisingly violent for a film made so long ago, but if you can face that,  then you should certainly see it.

 

(By the way, when I say 'cleaned-up', I mean technically, not morally, hisses, scratches and blurs eliminated). 

 

The film, starring the late Bob Hoskins and the still-very-much-alive Helen Mirren  was recently given generous praise by my old friend Simon Heffer in ���Standpoint��� magazine, but alas I cannot link to his interesting article and cannot lay my hand on it, and I���m sure that some of the things he said will be reflected, even possibly repeated in what I write here. Well, if so, he���ll just have to take it as a compliment.

 

A kind reader has now provided this link

But be warned - it gives away the plot : 

 

http://standpointmag.co.uk/culture-and-anarchy-december-14-bad-manors-simon-heffer-bob-hoskins

 

 

 

 

 

 

As with so many films, I thought I remembered it (and four or five particular scenes are stuck in my mind, not necessarily in a good way, though I���d forgotten the worst of the violence and wonder whether it had been cut from the version I saw in 1980 or 1981). But 35 years is a long time and memory ( as the authorities need to realise) is a lying jade, especially when it is at its most persuasive.

 

One of the things it has lost is the extreme slickness it seemed to have when it first came out. By modern standards it is slow-moving and rough-edged. The luxury isn���t especially luxurious, the smart cars are practically antiques, the flash and glitter of London now looks dun-coloured and cheap.  

 

But the special fascination is that it was made in London at the very beginning of the Thatcher era, in a  city quite recognisable to me (I lived there from 1977 to 1984).

 

I���ve been trying for some days to work out what exactly is so different. An opening scene shows Paddington Station, which I���ve been travelling through since 1963. Let���s start with some details and see how we get on. Taxis and other authorised vehicles at that time could still drive straight through the station,  coming in alongside Platform 8. Now only members of the Royal family and Politicians can  bring cars even close to the trains. Trains were blue and grey affairs with big openable windows and engines hitched to the front end.  Loudspeaker announcements were more or less impenetrable. Cappuccino hadn���t yet been invented.

 

The scene involves the unloading of a coffin from a guard���s van. I���m not going to tell you whose it is, where it has come from or why he���s dead, in case you haven���t seen the film. It���s much better if you don���t know.  I���m not sure if anyone would send a coffin anywhere by train any more, or where they would put it if they did. (Coffins seem to feature in many of the films I review here. Pure coincidence).

 

For the guard���s van, with its many uses (I once, in the early 1960s,  saw one full of Dartmoor prisoners in transit, or at least I think I did) is now a vanished feature of rail travel. The old HS125s have spacious guard���s vans in the locomotives at both ends, but they are always locked in case of terrorists, so instead they have carved a small bicycle space out of the quiet carriage, where presumably the terrorist danger is thought to be less).

 

As a cyclist, I used to spend a lot of time sitting on the floors of guard���s vans (seats in what was then called second class being hard to find) next to my machine. The inward-opening doors could be useful if the train stopped for ages at a signal near your destination. It was perfectly possible to open them up, sling your bike on to the track, watch as fellow-passengers shut them behind you, and ride home from wherever it was (unthinkable in these times). It���s still just possible to *shut* some train doors yourself, and to open them once they���ve been centrally unlocked, though this is rare. But these days we���re not trusted with doors (or windows) we can open ourselves,  in case we tumble out on the tracks or otherwise misbehave ourselves. We���re not trusted in general. Life is increasingly like being a toddler in day care, every surface cushioned, big notices everywhere telling us to be careful (I think there are now six separate warning notices on the exit doors of my usual train) , and large smiling nannies everywhere, who stop smiling abruptly if challenged.

 

Gone also, and forgotten, are the strange British Rail uniforms of the time, halfway between Edwardian postman and French Foreign Legion. We laughed at them then, but sort of got used to them. Now they look like something from a 1930s newsreel. 

 

The tracks at Paddington have been moved several yards further from London to make way for fast food stalls and shops.

 

But there���s something about the point at which Paddington station (like all big railway stations an enchanted place of fantasy and reverence for railway enthusiasts) gives on to London. The modern post-Thatcher Paddington is almost as glossy as an airport, and the contrast with the scruffy, seemingly untartable-up zone of Praed Street is so strong that people arriving from abroad on the Heathrow Express must wonder where on earth they���ve fetched up. This bit of London is haunted by an especially glum spirit, probably dating back to the days of Boadicea, and I wonder if they���ll ever manage to brighten it up as they���ve done at King���s Cross.

 

But in 1979 even Brunel���s railway cathedral was  grubby, untidy and close to the ground, not polished, as it is now,  in the cause of commerce.  London in general was closer to the ground, not seeking to impress or intimidate, just there, and all the more powerful a capital as a result, in my view.  You only realised it by bit that you were in the midst of great power, much as you might realise rather slowly that the slightly scruffy, elongated tweedy gent at the table next to you in the restaurant was in fact a decorated war hero, senior diplomat and author of an indispensable memoir of his life and travels.

 

As I see once more that very different station, I begin to imagine the London and the Britain that lay beyond it, chillier, greyer, smellier than today���s, but not in all ways worse.  In some fashion, I mourn its loss, because ( and Bill Bryson was rather good about this in one of his books, Notes From a Small Island���) the Britain of this era had rather a lot of good characteristics, now lost.

 

Anyone who wanted to work, could work. Wages for normal jobs, which were reasonably secure,  bore some relation to the cost of living, though at a much lower level than people now aspire to. We were considerably shabbier, worse dressed, and living in houses which were much less smart and well-equipped. There was, in an indefinable way, more kindness. I suspect it couldn���t have lasted.

 

Now, I don���t myself view this as a paradise wholly destroyed by Mrs Thatcher in an act of lone spite, though her government did play a significant part in the hurricane that would tear through it.  Thatcherism, so-called, was far less planned (especially the privatisation) than everyone now seems to think, and very nearly came completely off the rails (and would have done without the North Sea Oil).   If Jim Callaghan had won in 1979, he���d have had to do much the same, I fear.  Denis Healey had already begun the process as his Chancellor. I see it as the last, dying afterglow of the Butskell era ( the USA had a similar settlement, of full employment and reasonably high wages, known I believe as ���The Treaty of Detroit���) .  It was doomed by the cultural revolution, which had already begun to rip families to bits, and by the EU, which was exposing the protected bits of our economy, though most people weren���t fully aware that we had lost our independence or any real control over our destiny.

 

Another interesting film from rather earlier in this era which I���d like to see again is ���Sunday, Bloody Sunday��� from 1971, in which strikes and the failing balance of payments are the background music, and a scruffy, rather feverish post-Swinging Sixties London, with a homosexual man���s dilemmas thoughtfully portrayed,  in the foreground.

 

Mrs Thatcher, in my view, reacted to her circumstances rather than having any coherent strategy. This was certainly so in the Falklands, where the Navy saved her from her own grave errors of judgment. But it was also the case in the economy, where so much manufacturing industry vanished in what might these days be called ���collateral damage���.

 

Hence her reliance in the end on secondary bubbles ��� banking and property ��� to fill the gap left by  the disappearance of manufacturing and of many old-fashioned office jobs too.

 

One of those bubbles, property, provides the plot for  ���The Long Good Friday���. Reasonably prophetically, the hero/villain, played by Bob Hoskins, reckons he can turn his seedy, violent Kray-like crime empire (presumably based on extortion and protection rackets)  into a legitimate big business if he can get into property on the banks of the Thames east of Tower Bridge. This is of course the true scene of a gigantic property revolution, as anyone who knows London well knows.  If you didn���t know the city before its transformation, you can see here just how huge the change has been.

 

Hoskins has the usual collection of scarred and deadly henchmen, but also has the unlikely assistance of Helen Mirren, playing a public schoolgirl gone to the bad, putting her looks and charm at the service of Hoskins���s gangland outfit. Without her, it���s hard to see how Hoskins (first shown arriving home on Concorde from New York in a blaze of vulgarity) could have won the trust of the Cosa Nostra smoothies he is trying to persuade to invest in his Docklands scheme.

 

We see, for the last time, the undeveloped empty and abandoned wharves as they were before the real money men came in.

 

We also see and hear a fair amount of casual racial bigotry which no director would risk now, and are shown London pubs, restaurants, swimming baths and domestic interiors, unselfconsciously as they were, plus the odd fashions in hair and clothes which people thought normal at the time, as they always do.  Drink is incessantly taken. Smoking is shown as it often was, a thoughtless reflex,  not as a device to show we���re in the past.

 

And then there are two rather sad semi-patriotic soliloquies delivered by the squat and noisy Hoskins (who in truth couldn���t really play nasty enough for the role), one all but raving about the great new future Britain has in Europe, and the other vapouring about how Britain stood alone in her finest hour, as so many people still do when they can���t think of anything else to say. When will we arrive at the point when we recognise that this event , 75 long years ago, was not *our* finest hour but that of our fathers and grandfathers  - who might not be that impressed by what we���ve done with the resulting victory.

 

In the middle of a gutted London, once the Heart of Empire, a forest of masts from Tower Bridge to Greenwich,  a petty gangster (whose national service, we learn,  ended in the glasshouse) wraps himself in the flag as he prepares to import much bigger gangsters from abroad. Perhaps it���s a metaphor for something. And it wouldn���t be a bad theme by itself ��� but when it goes wrong, it goes really, really wrong.  It will make you think, and it well entertain you. It deserves a full revival.