Sara Batkie
What makes a good face for a leading role in Hollywood? Ask a studio exec and they’d probably say whatever makes the most money. Ask an awards body and they might go with one that’s been manipulated to better mimic the real life person an actor is playing. Regardless, it usually helps if it’s conventionally attractive underneath all the hair and makeup. But different genres have different needs and in the case of 1980’s crime drama The Long Good Friday – which is getting a handsome Criterion re-release this week after years out of print – the distinctive mug of Bob Hoskins is crucial to its success.
By the time we meet Harold Shand, the East End gangster played by Hoskins, a plot is already in motion, though it will take some time before the true significance of it becomes clear. He’s introduced striding through Heathrow, returning from a clandestine trip overseas, and we can tell by the constrained way he carries himself that he’s a man wound tight. Like a boy trying to fit himself into a suit two sizes too big, Harold is desperate to appear high class to the “Yanks” he has just persuaded to consider backing a real-estate scheme related to the 1988 Olympics, which will finally give him the legitimacy he yearns for. “The right people must mastermind the new London,” as he puts it, and he has spent years molding himself into the right person, from his chintzy penthouse down to his elegant girlfriend Victoria (played by an ice cool Helen Mirren). Problem is, bombs keep going off when he’s around and he has no idea who’s setting them.
Most of the action takes place on the titular religious holiday as Harold becomes increasingly frenzied in his search for who’s out to get him, but the answer is much more complicated than a simple case of betrayal or revenge. Conceived and filmed at the dawn of the Thatcher era, Friday has the feel of a film made on the cusp, with all the pent-up energy that entails. “This is the decade when London will become Europe’s capital,” Harold declares to a yacht filled with people who have the congenital wealth he can never hope to claim. But he is a distinctly capitalist beast and as a man with both cops and union bosses on his payroll, he’s confident he’s covered his bases. He just didn’t count on an enemy who doesn’t care about money.
Screenwriter Barrie Keeffe wrote the role of Harold with Hoskins in mind, and as Friday progresses it’s easy to see why. At the time, the actor was mostly known for his extensive stagework and his lead role in BBC’s Pennies From Heaven miniseries. With his short stature, barrel chest, and bulldog grimace, Hoskins naturally recalls such early Hollywood heavies as Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney. But his Shakespearean background lends Harold a studied quality that his American forebears lacked. In part it’s his body language, which has the cramped containment of a man at pains not to get his hands dirty. Gradually this facade threatens to explode as he becomes increasingly unable to repress his rage. By the time he’s stringing up the bosses of other crime families by their feet from meat hooks, we believe he’s capable of anything.
Now Hoskins’s Cockney bruiser feels like an obvious precursor to such performers as Ray Winstone in Sexy Beast – and Ben Kingsley in Sexy Beast, for that matter. But for audiences more accustomed to the suave sophistication cultivated by Michael Caine or Sean Connery, Hoskins’s instinctive physicality and malleable face are uniquely electrifying to behold. It’s in the jut of his jaw, the flare of his nostrils, the snarl of his bared teeth. It’s in the way his expression clicks into place when he decides to torture one of his own cronies, only to quickly collapse when he realizes he’s gone too far. Only a performer so completely in control could convincingly play a man so at odds with his own nature.
All of this builds to one of the most sublimely downbeat endings of all time. It wouldn’t be sporting to reveal the particulars here, but suffice to say that director John Mackenzie – whose camerawork has matched his protagonist’s restive energy thus far – knows when to hold still. The majority of Friday’s final minutes are devoted to a sustained closeup of the emotional semaphore of Hoskins’s face as he goes from shocked to terrified to rueful to possibly amused and back again. It’s the sort of bravura piece of acting that looks easy but isn’t, as actors as varied as George Clooney and Aziz Ansari have proven in the many homages since.
Why it works so well is interesting to consider. It’s not simply Hoskins’s innate talent, or that as an actor he would have been fairly novel to viewers at the time. Harold as a character isn’t naturally sympathetic either, given that we see him do things like glass someone in the throat and knock Victoria around. But his position as a striver is. There is also the dawning sense in the audience alongside Harold that his fate was sealed long before the film’s action even began. Hoskins would go on to play variations on the tough guy throughout his career, but he rarely got a role that allowed for as much gradation on the trope as The Long Good Friday. It goes to show that not all screen transformations are literal. Sometimes it just takes the right face.
“The Long Good Friday” is out today on 4K UHD from the Criterion Collection.
