April Showers: Don't Flirt With Pierce Brosnan!
Thursday, April 21, 2011 at 11:00PM waterworks each weeknight at 11
Have you ever seen the British gangster drama The Long Good Friday (1980)? I had never heard of it until a few years ago. It starred Helen Mirren and Bob Hoskins before I knew who they were and was released well before I started seeing R rated movies that only adults would like. I was wildly in love with the TV show Remington Steele (1982-1987) as a kid but back then I never considered whether actors had existed before I knew who they were (unless they were older actors and clearly MOVIE STARS like Liz Taylor & Jane Fonda and those types.) Pierce Brosnan existed before Remington Steele!!! Who knew?
26 year old's Pierce Brosnan's film debut "The Long Good Friday"
But there he is pre-Remington Steele, pre James Bond, pre Mamma Mia!. This is his big screen debut and he is billed as "1st Irishman" He has two scenes and no lines. He doesn't even utter a sound in the movie. (A mute Pierce Brosnan! Why didn't the makers of Mamma Mia! think of that?). But you don't need vocal chords when you look like this.
The Long Good Friday is a pretty tense crime movie all told and it uses that out-of-fashion tactic of keeping you in the dark about what's going on for at least one reel (today's movies love exposition too much to do this frequently anymore). The first 20 minutes are very disorienting as there's virtually no dialogue for half of that and we see a theft, a gay bar pickup, three murders, a funeral, an old woman spitting in the face of a young man and a yacht party thrown by Bob Hoskins and Helen Mirren all of which have little context or connective tissue that we can make sense of.
But the man who lifted the money in the first scene, Colin (Paul Freeman) goes swimming whilst young Pierce keeps leering at him. To complete the cruising bait, Pierce heads for a literal April Shower, it being Good Friday and all. More after the jump.)