The Long Good Friday (1980)

Judgement day for the king of violence...

‘Something in the water…’

Right. The Long Good Friday (1980). Two 80s films for you this weekend. Which, together with Another Country (1984), the subject of last Sunday’s newsletter, makes up an unofficial ‘Eighties Trilogy’- three films that captured the zeitgeist. It’s always tricky to pinpoint change, that sudden shift, something in the air, a metamorphosis afoot. Perhaps Mrs. T spiked the water supply- like in the plot of the very first episode of The Professionals (1976). The Long Good Friday was made in 1979 and released in 1981, yet it’s poles apart from, say, The Eyes of Laura Mars- the New Yorker’s giallo- made only the year before. Worlds apart; on a different planet.

John Mackenzie’s The Long Good Friday- a gangster film, shot like a thriller- is set against a backdrop of free-market enterprise, of docklands regeneration, a sense (depending on your political affiliation) that Britain- at last- could reverse its social and economic decline; a reassessment of Britain’s place in the world. The London of early 1980s thrillers now seems curiously quaint, with only one skyscraper- The NatWest Tower (as it was then called); Bodie and Doyle running amok amongst derelict warehouses, tight jeans, perms and a Walther P38; foreign office assignations (briefcases and velvet collars) at the the Festival Hall (Oh concrete brutality! Oh Brave New World!) and a blazered Lewis Collins in the SAS wunderwork, Who Dares Wins (1982), ‘taking’ Porsche owner, Judy Davis, ‘to bed’ in her ex-warehouse apartment in St Katherine’s Dock- exposed brick arches, Indian antiques, palms, white sofas and Art Deco.

Judgment day for the king of violence…