Unsentimental expertise... Bob Hoskins gets to grips with Dave King in The Long Good Friday. Photograph: Calendar Prods/The Kobal Collection
For the sake of my blood pressure and the wider good of not soaking those reading with journalistic spittle, it's best I don't dwell on the news that The Long Good Friday is to be remade for America. If you like the idea of this extraordinary film being manhandled by Paul WS Anderson, director of Alien vs Predator and Mortal Kombat, with the aim of "[revealing] today's gritty underworld in equally shocking fashion," I'm happy for you, even if I can't promise to see you in the foyer.
No, for me it's better to count to ten and simply remember the original - the greatest British gangster movie ever made, and among the finest films to emerge here in any genre. Director John MacKenzie's final reckoning of old school hardman Harold Shand has the unsentimental expertise of a butcher, the vision of a psychic, and a master film-maker's grasp of vice-tight plot dynamics. Detailing strutting bulldog Shand's doomed attempts to crack the big-league of international crime while an unknown nemesis closes in, it's a joyride in a car whose brakes are set to fail, the thrill of acceleration always accompanied by a gut realisation of how badly this is all going to end.
With the stink of cologne and fuggy boozers almost palpable, MacKenzie's film features a rich sense of melodrama, guignol violence, indelible dialogue ("The Mafia? I shit 'em") and a pair of astonishing performances from Hoskins and Helen Mirren as his glacial trophy wife. All of which would be enough to ensure the film's status among the cream of British gangster movies - a peer to the equally caustic Get Carter, the lysergic Performance and the enduring Brighton Rock.
But there's something else at work in The Long Good Friday - an elegy for Britain's past, and a prophetic glimpse of its future. By the time the film was released in early 1981, the Thatcherite project was in full swing, and in Harold the country's mood found its perfect embodiment: a man defined both by brutality and feverish aspiration, desperate to transcend his background and become a more respectable class of entrepreneur. And the vehicle for this transformation? A vainglorious plan to redevelop Docklands.
MacKenzie could have only suspected how symbolic the rotting, moribund docks would become in gleaming brave new Britain, but he knew his anti-hero well enough to choose the site of his fantasies wisely. Harold the self-proclaimed "boy from Stepney" was the last representative of the traditional East End underworld, and by extension the whole post-war order - and in the course of the film, he and it would be exposed as relics.
In reality, meanwhile, his dream of reinventing the derelict corners of his own turf would be executed by moneymen of a different stripe (what he visualised as a luxury marina later became Canary Wharf) - while the rackets on which he had grown rich were divvied up among a fragmented patchwork of global interests.
"But it's my manor," a defiant Harold raged as his empire was stripped away; except of course it wasn't. It was a different manor now, for all of us - Shand's whole world (his East End, his London, his Britain) on the very cusp of vanishing into history, that strange, epochal moment preserved forever in MacKenzie's bloody time capsule.
So let Paul WS Anderson do his worst. Although I won't be watching the results, I'm sure the ghost of Harold Shand will...
