The Long Good Friday

The Long Good Friday was released in 1980 and directed by John Mackenzie. Rather than simply retelling the plot, the film is worth revisiting for the characters, conflicts and ideas that give its story its identity.

Fear, Loss and Greed emerge through what the characters face and the choices they make, giving the story more to explore beyond its immediate plot.

Harold Shand, Victoria and Parky do not begin the film seeing one another clearly, and watching those first impressions break down is a big part of why The Long Good Friday still works.

A man, Colin, delivers a large sum of cash to an unknown recipient in Belfast, by suitcase, in the process helping himself to some of the cash.

Colin then goes to a bar with his driver Phil, where he picks up a young man. That detail matters because it shapes the way the characters initially see one another.

As the recipients of the cash count the money in a country farmhouse, searching for the missing amount that Colin took, uniformed gunmen attack them. From there, the film can concentrate less on explaining the setup and more on what happens between the people inside it.

Bob Hoskins plays Harold Shand. Jeff is Harold Shand's right-hand man.

The spitting incident is witnessed with concern by Razors, Harold Shand's driver and enforcer.

Harold Shand is a London firm gangster who aspires to become a legitimate businessman.

Shand returns from a trip to the USA on Concorde, and is met by Jeff at Heathrow airport.

Helen Mirren plays Victoria. Despite Harold becoming angry and aggressive due to stress, Victoria's loyalty remains with him, and she shares both her fear, and suspicions about Jeff with him.

That pressure reveals more about Victoria than the surface-level role alone would suggest.

Razors then takes Shand's mother in Harold's Rolls Royce to church to mark Good Friday, while Harold and his girlfriend Victoria hold a party on their boat by Tower Bridge for various London politicians, officials and policeman, designed both to curry favour for a casino project Harold wants to develop, and impress the arriving American businessmen Harold is trying to persuade to invest in his concept for the redevelopment of the London Docklands. That relationship helps define Victoria beyond the immediate plot mechanics.

Coming on too brash and pushy, Harold has already got off on the wrong foot with Charlie, one of the two American businessman with whom he hopes to do business, while his girlfriend Victoria, cultured and erudite, works to smooth relations.

The movie has more on its mind than the basic setup suggests. fear sits close to the centre of the film, but it is explored through the characters rather than treated like a lesson.

loss matters just as much. The film keeps challenging the assumptions its characters make about one another, which is where much of its emotional weight comes from.

There is also plenty here about greed and consumerism. Those ideas overlap rather than sitting in separate boxes, which helps the movie feel like a story about people rather than a checklist of themes.

The film could hardly be separated from the decade that produced it. Released in 1980, it carries the attitudes, style and filmmaking rhythms of the 1980s without needing to announce them.

It also sits comfortably within the era's crime, drama and gangster filmmaking, even if the movie itself is more interesting than any single genre label suggests.

That is part of why it still appears in conversations about The Long Good Friday 1980 and 1980s movies. The film has become tied not only to its own story but to the wider memory of what 1980s movies felt like.

Watching The Long Good Friday now means seeing both what has lasted and what unmistakably belongs to 1980.

What still works best is the human material. Ideas around fear, loss and greed have not stopped being relevant simply because the clothes, language and cultural references belong to another era.

Some moments inevitably land differently for a modern audience. Revisiting an older film properly means enjoying what still works without pretending every choice has aged equally well.

A large part of that staying power comes from the characters. Harold Shand, Victoria and Parky are still useful shorthand for the personalities and pressures the film explores.

Carpenter's film has lasted because people continue to recognise something in it. Nostalgia helps, but nostalgia alone does not keep a movie in the conversation for decades.