Revisiting The Long Good Friday

Pierce Brosnan as an IRA gunman, proving that the best laid plans... Just watched Arrow's magnificent looking Blu-Ray edition of The Long Good Friday and it feels like I've seen the film for the first time, so much so that I got a jolt when the IRA was mentioned by name - most likely I was remembering another film where the movement were discreetly known as the Organization or some such thing, perhaps Odd Man Out or A Fistful of Dynamite, I can't remember which... My screening of The Long Good Friday was fortuitous I think, on foot of my recent revisiting of the Sex Pistols documentary The Filth and the Fury - the implosion of the Pistols and the original punk rock scene dovetails nicely with The Long Good Friday's heralding of a new decade of entrepreneurship and clean, good-looking, apolitical pop, John Mackenzie’s film even opens with confident, synthesizer driven theme music. "It's important that the right people mastermind the new London" Harold Shand says at one point, and I don't suppose he had Malcolm McLaren or Johnny Rotten in mind...