On the 30th anniversary of the release of Britain’s best gangster movie, Hardeep Singh Kohli celebrates its eerie prescience
‘I’m not a politician, I’m a businessman with a sense of history… our country is not an island any more…’
Harold Shand; gangster, visionary and entrepreneur. For many, The Long Good Friday is the finest British gangster film ever made. Much as I concur with that recommendation, to describe it as merely a gangster movie is to be excessively reductive.
When I first watched The Long Good Friday a couple of decades ago, I too loved it as a gangster movie; a film bristling with brutality, suffocatingly suspenseful and fulfilling all the criteria for excellent storytelling. Every few years I would dust off the DVD and watch it again; having done so recently with a friend, I experienced the film anew. I realised that beyond the unfolding inexorability of the protagonist’s downfall, there was a significance in the film in terms of the unfolding inexorability of British politics.
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