Hoskins was tracked down to the London Hospital for Tropical Diseases where a 27ft-long tapeworm was preparing to emerge from his backside. Mackenzie says, ‘Bob now says it was 35ft or something... it gets longer every time I hear that story. He’d just done Zulu Dawn, a terrible film, I’m told, but he was very committed to it, and he was very committed to Africa. Bob gets very intense about causes and he commits himself to them, but only for a time, but he does so wholeheartedly, which is lovely and it’s very refreshing and you go along with it. So he went out there to South Africa and he decided he wanted to live like the natives. “I’m not living in a fucking hotel,” he said. So he lived in a hut. They gave him a hut and a telephone, and that’s how he got the tapeworm.’
The procedure was a delicate one; the worm had to be removed foot by foot and a nurse warned the visitors not to over-excite her patient as the worm might snap, leaving poor Bob to endure the whole ‘birth’ again. Keefe adds, ‘But telling Bob not to get excited is like telling Ian Paisley in full flight not to mention the Troubles.’ Sure enough, as Hoskins listened to the pitch it was difficult to restrain him, having instantly connected with Harold Shand. ‘The gang could call him “H”,’ he declared, before suggesting the film be called H. Leaping out of bed, creative juices flowing, Hoskins demonstrated how the poster should look, a dominant H, like a crucifix, with Shand nailed to it.
Thanking Bob for his thought-provoking suggestions, Keefe and Hanson left. However implausible the crucifix idea, it reminded Keefe of one gruesome story from his days as a journalist. He recalls, ‘I had to go and see someone in hospital that had been found crucified to a warehouse floor. That was the punishment if you overstepped in someone else’s territory. I asked him, the holes in his palms quite visible, how it happened and he said, “Listen, son, put it down as a do-it-yourself accident. And I’d keep your fucking mouth shut.”’ A not dissimilar incident eventually found its way into the film.
Like Keefe, Hoskins had been brought up in a tough London neighbourhood, Finsbury Park, and knew his fair share of dodgy characters. Anxious to base Shand on authentic heavies and not be a crude caricature, Hoskins casually hung out with some of these bygone rogues. Most were flattered that an actor wanted to be like them. ‘Well, look at this little feller here, wants to be a gangster!’ they’d playfully jibe. There was even employment to be had for a lucky few on the film as extras or technical advisers. Mackenzie observes, ‘They were quite an interesting lot. Barrie Keefe also knew quite a few, actually, because he’d been a journalist in the East End and had an “in” to that world. They were only on set for certain scenes. The big one is where the gang all get tooled up with guns and Bob tells them as they go off, “Be discreet.” Well, those were all crooks and criminals who knew what the hell they were doing.’
This ‘underworld’ presence ensured the film contained what Keefe calls ‘the smell of authenticity’. Certainly, the crew made full use of the free advice on offer, as well as Mackenzie. ‘They’d say, “John, not that I’ve ever done it, but if you’re gonna stab someone you wouldn’t do it like that.”’
During one scene, Hoskins was in full flight, arms flaying about and mouth on overdrive. One of the cons quietly took him aside and said, ‘Look, you don’t have to shout. They know who you are, so why are you shouting?’ It’s the understatement that makes it work. Keefe agrees. ‘The thing I noticed when I was moving around in that kind of environment, in the background, just listening, was when anyone was making a threat, and I did hear a message go out to hit someone, they speak very quietly. There’s no “Get that fucking cunt!” Rather, it’s “Well, this is definitely out of order, I think he needs a bit of a seeing to.” It’s so quiet and that’s the real menace.’
Hanson meanwhile was having no joy in hawking the script around. Thames were the first to turn it down, followed by Euston, makers of The Sweeney and Minder. Luck intervened when Hanson was given a budget of just under £l million by Charles Denton, Managing Director of Black Lion Films, run by Lew Grade, with the intention of turning The Long Good Friday into a feature film. Next, John Mackenzie was hired and read the script. ‘It was pretty awful, a bit theatrical and self-consciously tweedy funny, almost like a Carry On, which was totally wrong because we wanted it to be real, but with irony. The essence of the story was there, but it needed an awful lot doing to it.’
Pre-production began in earnest at an office acquired in London’s famous Carnaby Street. Mackenzie remembers it as ‘a dreadful place, above a shop that sold tatty old jeans and belted out music all day’. The meetings there were intoxicating, producing what Hanson called ‘high-octane creativity’, with ideas being volleyed around between writer, producer and director. Hoskins was also heavily involved, particularly in terms of dialogue, bringing with him as he did the Cockney vernacular. He was responsible for the classic line where Shand, hearing of a fallen comrade’s body being taken to the morgue concealed in an ice cream van, says, ‘There’s a lot of dignity in that, ain’t there? Going out like a raspberry ripple.’ Bob’s help did in the end, though, prove something of a strain. Keefe explains, ‘Bob doesn’t have ideas, he has visions. He’s so creative and has such an energy level. He has a different idea every five minutes. Film is a collaborative process, but we had to send him away because he was too inspired. Barry said to him, “You’ve got to get a sun tan and look fit for this part.” So they sent him on holiday to Greece. It was just an excuse to get him out of the fucking office for a bit. We had visions of him running up and down mountains but he came back with about an extra stone in weight.’
Keefe’s thankless task was to pool everyone’s ideas and make them work on paper, building up his original 50-minute TV script to nearly two hours in length for the cinema. Once Hoskins locked him in the office overnight, posting two packets of fags through the letterbox to keep him going.
Keefe wanted his story to move at a rate of knots, pepper it with his characteristically abrasive dialogue and be visually gripping. ‘In other films I’ve seen, you often just get people sitting around tables talking, so I tried to think of imaginative places to put them, like in the abattoir scene. That dialogue with the gang bosses could have been sitting around the table. I think if you’re going to see a film, it’s got to be something exciting and visual, ’cos you don’t remember the dialogue so much, you remember what you see.’
Shand’s interrogation of a cache of villains strung up on meat hooks is perhaps Friday’s dominant image. Mackenzie recalls, ‘Originally, they were captured in a truck and tied up, that’s all. Then we decided to take them to an abattoir, we thought it would be great... but was it hell, it was dreadful!’ Mackenzie’s idea was to wheel them in on the overhead rails upside down, just like meat carcasses, which presented its own special problem. ‘It was a nightmare. The guys were wired so they wouldn’t drop on their heads, but we couldn’t leave them hanging upside down, especially the bigger guys... one of them started to faint, you know, all their guts drop. So we devised a scheme whereby we kept their legs tied but in between takes ladders were put underneath them and someone would get up and they would be held up and then lowered for the shot. There were quite a few stuntmen in there, and a few cons, too.’
By the close of pre-production, eight separate scripts existed and Mackenzie resorted to laying all the copies on the office floor and cherry-picking what was best from each one. Crucially, it was Mackenzie’s decision to build up the role of the IRA. ‘For me, that was the theme of the film, really, it was committed terrorist versus capitalist thug and which wins. I thought that was a very interesting theme because it had never been done before and it gave extra weight to what was a gangster film. We weren’t trying to praise terrorism, but it was that these people were committed to their cause and not just to wealth and the glorification of themselves, which was what Harold Shand was all about.’
But that left a big problem over the film’s title. Hanson liked The Paddy Factor; Mackenzie hated it. ‘You’re giving the fuc
king plot away,’ Mackenzie argued. ‘We’re not supposed to know it’s the IRA.’ It’s only as the film unravels that Shand learns his empire is under threat not from usurping local gangsters but Irish provos. The subsequent search for a suitable replacement title became something of a bëte noir, with Hoskins again being the main culprit. Every few days he seemed to have a new title — Harold’s Kingdom, Havoc, Citadel of Blood and Diabolical Liberty, after one of Shand’s infamous expressions. ‘It was crazy,’ admits Keefe. And it was in desperation that Mackenzie suddenly said, ‘We’ve got to have a fucking working title.’
With the story taking place over Easter, Mackenzie juggled with the words Good Friday, then, remembering the Philip Marlowe story The Long Goodbye, cleverly merged the two together coming up with The Long Good Friday: ‘I said, “Let’s just use that.” So I wrote it on the clapperboard and it sort of stuck, although people kept coming up with new ones. Bob would say, “I’ve got another title.” I said, pointing at the clapperboard, “That’s the title!”’
Thoughts now reverted to casting. For the Mafia big-shot Anthony Franciosa, a tough Italian-American actor, was hired. Mackenzie recalls, ‘But we didn’t know at that stage he was badly into the drug scene. After three days on the set, somebody gave him the latest script and he said, “You mean it’s changed?” And we said, “Well, yeah, yours was a very early edition.” He said, “I’ve learnt it all. I’m not a good studier and I could never learn any more words.” So he took off and went back home.’ A replacement had to be found... fast. Eddie Constantine, no stranger to the gangster milieu having starred in the cult movie Alphaville, was flown over from Paris. Mackenzie believes ‘he’s actually not great in the film because he couldn’t remember the words, so we staggered through it, really. But he looks the part, he had this classic gangster look.’
Way down the cast, indeed he doesn’t even get to say a line, is one Pierce Brosnan. In only his second film, the future 007 plays an Irish hitman. Mackenzie remembers, ‘Pierce came from my casting director. I didn’t know him at all. I said, “Let’s not go for conventional ideas of what IRA guys are like.” We had to have this business of him being a sex trap for this guy at the beginning, so we needed someone who looked good.’
Mackenzie later directed Brosnan in one of his best pre-Bond roles as the Russian terrorist Michael Caine hunts down in The Fourth Protocol, but very nearly killed him shooting Friday’s climactic scene where he holds Hoskins at gunpoint in a car. ‘That was quite dangerous. Normally, you’d do some of that stuff on back projection in the studio but we just couldn’t afford any of that so we had to do it for real with the cameraman in the car, Pierce right next to him and I had to drive. We even had the sound man in the car... unbelievable... people were in the boot, wires everywhere.’
From day one, Mackenzie knew how he wanted his film to end, on a big close-up of Hoskins in the back of this car as he comes to realise he’s being driven to his death, his face a map of contrasting emotions, arrogance, rage, fear, resignation and finally a begrudging admiration for his opponents. ‘So I had to drive the damn car and direct Bob in the rear-view mirror. We came out of the Savoy, turned left into the Strand and headed towards Trafalgar Square. It’s quite difficult to drive the car and not only watch the actor but cue him. I mean, I was acting with him in a sense, so it’s very difficult to take your eye off him, so we nearly crashed. Somehow, magically the Strand was emptyish in front of us, it was about one or two in the morning. But as I got more enthralled with Bob the less I looked down. I thought, Christ, he’s doing it, he’s absolutely terrific, and I got so involved this fucking bus just missed us because by that time I was hitting Trafalgar Square. Anyway, it didn’t hit us, thank God. I could have killed them all.’
Besides Hoskins, the most important role to get right was Victoria, Shand’s posh bit of skirt. As originally written, Victoria was your traditional gangster’s moll, not very bright (in Hanson’s words, ‘a pea-brained tart’) who says nothing throughout the movie until the end when she smiles revealing a gob full of bad teeth. ‘I can’t sustain a film with that!’ argued Mackenzie, who visualised the character as being much more than an appendage with tits to Mr Big, but strong and effective in her own right. The actress he had in mind was Helen Mirren. ‘I always thought she was terrific, a class actress. She was well known but hadn’t done much in the way of films. I went to see her, had a long conversation and we sold her on the idea. She was very keen on some sort of film part, she could see that it had a lot of potential.’
Like Mackenzie, Mirren’s take on Victoria was to turn her almost into Shand’s equal, a woman of power and influence. Keefe set about drastically rewriting the part to fit this new vision. Mackenzie remembers, ‘I did have a few tussles with Helen, but never in the sense of making her the little lady at the sink because the whole idea was Victoria wouldn’t be like that. But, of course, she wanted more, she wanted to be Harold Shand really, she wanted to go out there shooting people. She tends to be that when you see her in those Prime Suspect telly things; she’s a bit of a ball-crusher with the boys. I used the word “acolyte” once and she hated it. Maybe I was being too artsy-fartsy. It was in the scene when he’s in the shower. Maybe I got a bit carried away with it, I saw it as a symbolic thing, him being cleansed for battle. And I said, “Bring in his clothes and put them on the bed and burn all the old clothes... I want to make it almost like a Greek thing where you’re a sort of goddess or maybe you’re the acolyte.” “Acolyte!” she said. “Fuck,” I said, “wrong word, why did I say it?” We had a big fight over that. She eventually did it, but she tried not to and got very silly saying that it made her subservient. “I’ve never made a cup of tea for a man,” she said, or something like that. She’s a fucking liar, I mean now she does nothing but make cups of tea for her husband!’
The chemistry between Hoskins and Mirren is undeniable and the actress’s contribution to the film must not be underestimated. Keefe had written a love scene. Both are terrified of the IRA coming and out of fear springs sex. But Mackenzie was loath to do it. ‘I didn’t want to see them lash around the floor. I said, “It’s going to spoil it, let’s keep the bedroom out of it, or imply it’s there rather than have lashings of saliva and all that shit.” Helen agreed totally, which surprised me ’cos I thought she would maybe want that ’cos she likes to show that she’s a bit of a sex goddess. We thought of other things to do and then she said, “I just think it would be great for once we see fear, that she’s frightened, wouldn’t she be frightened?” And I said, “She’d be scared shitless, we all would.” She said, “Well, I think I should just break down and cry.” And I said, “What a great idea.” Now if I’d suggested it she would have said, “I never cry! The man will cry.” It was a great idea and it worked beautifully: it made her so human, not weak at all.’
As the start date loomed, poor Barrie Keefe was still thumping away on his typewriter churning out new scenes. ‘It was such an endurance test doing that film. By the time I’d typed the end, I think on the Sunday night and filming started on the Monday, I was so knackered. I lost a stone-and-a-half in weight from start to finish and slept for two days when it was all over.’ Remarkably, The Long Good Friday remains Keefe’s first and only filmed cinema screenplay. It was a pressurised shoot, eight weeks during the fine British summer of 1979, but joyously harmonious. Many who worked on the film have spoken of it being one of the happiest they’d been on.
Mackenzie, who earned the nickname ‘Frenzy Mackenzie’, aimed for a film of high style with everything done out on location, much of it around Docklands. Shand’s yacht, hired according to Hanson from a business type who’d just had the dubious distinction of being kicked out of Idi Amin’s Uganda, was moored at Canary Wharf where today the huge skyscraper stands. Then it was just an open dock with a tatty little shed down one side. Though a building site, you could smell in the air that development and rampant capitalism was coming. In this respect, Friday was a very prescient film. The Tories ha
d just swept into power and Shand, the old-fashioned crook-turned-capitalist, was keen to embrace the ruthless free market ideals of the onrushing 1980s. His scheme to set up a semi-legit international consortium to redevelop Docklands using Mafia money made him the bastard offspring of Al Capone and Margaret Thatcher. ‘He was definitely a proponent of Thatcherism,’ Mackenzie suggests. ‘He had the local councillor in his back pocket, which was sort of shades of what was happening with Docklands. There was an awful lot of baksheesh going on. But you felt that entrepreneurial stuff, this mobster extolling the cultural values of London. Maybe Thatcher was inspired by him!’
The Long Good Friday opened in London during February 1981, notching up record-breaking business in some cinemas. It wasn’t long before touts were operating in the West End selling tickets for double the face value and, later, even bootleg videos, the dubious quality of which appalled Mackenzie. It was a hit, no doubt due to the near universal critical response. ‘The first British thriller to even approach the crackling vitality of the classic Hollywood gangster movies,’ said the Daily Mail.
Hoskins was especially singled out for praise. ‘Not since Edward G Robinson has a character actor dominated a thriller,’ wrote the Sunday Times. Going on to win the Evening Standard award for Best Actor and also nominated for a BAFTA, Hoskins was catapulted into the big time becoming one of Britain’s biggest film stars in the Eighties. Keefe remembers with fondness an occasion when he phoned Hoskins up about something soon after the actor had taken off in Hollywood and getting the reply, ‘What you don’t seem to realise, Barrie, is now I’m in a different stratosphere.’
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