In our new weekly series, One Special Thing, the Globe arts staff highlights something timeless — movies, books, TV shows, albums, paintings, plays, symphonies, dishes — that we return to in good times and bad. Something we’re just dying to tell you about. The only parameter is passion.
Harold Shand is a nasty piece of work. He’s a gangland kingpin who isn’t just rough around the edges: He’s rough here, there, and everywhere. You know that Tina Turner introduction to “Proud Mary”: “We always do it nice and rough”? Harold, as played by Bob Hoskins in “The Long Good Friday” (1980), leaves out the nice. Presumably, he put it in a sack with concrete overshoes and dumped it in the Thames a long time ago.
It wasn’t Hoskins’s portrayal of Harold that made him a — well, “star” isn’t the right word. Hoskins was short and balding and roly-poly and conveyed a constant sense of barely-suppressed rage. That’s not exactly a prescription for stardom. Pauline Kael famously described him in her New Yorker review of “Mona Lisa” (1986) as “a testicle on legs.” She meant it as a compliment.
The Harvard Film Archive screens “The Long Good Friday” and “Mona Lisa” on April 3.
The performance that made Hoskins famous was in the British television version of “Pennies from Heaven” (1977). It revealed his acting sweet spot: that place where aspiration meets desperation, and vice versa. Almost never seen on screen, it’s seen all the time in life.
“Mona Lisa” earned Hoskins an Oscar nomination for best actor. “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” (1988) gave him his most famous role and biggest hit. His built-in cartoonishness sealed the deal on his fitting in so gloriously with all those actual cartoons. But Hoskins’s finest moment on screen comes elsewhere, at the very end of “Long Good Friday.”
It’s a series of close-ups over the course of the final two minutes of the movie.
Things have not been going Harold’s way, and he hasn’t been able to figure out quite why. A lot of blood has been shed in his attempt to do so. Sitting in the back seat of a limousine — yes, that squinty-eyed guy in the front passenger seat is Pierce Brosnan, making his film debut — Harold finally figures out what’s been going on. Or maybe a more accurate description would be he is made to figure it out.
Seated in the limo, he exclaims over the absence of his girlfriend (a terrific Helen Mirren — she and Hoskins are class couple in the yearbook of movie implacability) — then remains silent. That’s as it should be, since words could add nothing to the eloquence of the expressions that now succeed one another on Harold’s face.
The range of emotions includes, but is not limited to: consternation (what’s going on?), recognition (oh, this is what’s been going on), anger (ditto), affront (ditto), frustration (ditto), grim amusement (ditto), resignation (well, it’s all over), calculation (or maybe it isn’t).
What makes Hoskins’s acting here so astounding, and that’s not too strong a word, is how coherent, even seamless, he renders those ostensibly disparate responses. It’s been said that the greatest of all movie special effects is the sight of someone in close-up changing his or her mind. Understood that way, Hoskins is a veritable galaxy far, far away.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but screen acting doesn’t come any better. Falconetti on trial, in “The Passion of Joan of Arc” (1928); Brando in that cab — speaking of back seats — in “On the Waterfront” (1954); Brando beseeching his dead wife, in “Last Tango in Paris” (1972); De Niro, in and out of the ring, in “Raging Bull” (1980); Daniel Day-Lewis shaking the superflux, in “There Will Be Blood” (2007). You’re welcome to add your own names to the list. Those two minutes are at that level of acting magnitude.
“The Long Good Friday” is available for streaming on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Criterion Channel, HBO Max, Hulu, YouTube TV.
Mark Feeney can be reached at mark.feeney@globe.com.