General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Mona Lisa (1986 film)

Mona Lisa is a 1986 British neo-noir crime film directed by Neil Jordan, in which an ex-convict, George (Bob Hoskins), is hired as driver and minder for a high-class London call girl, Simone (Cathy Tyson), and falls in love with her while helping her search for a missing teenage prostitute. It was Jordan's third feature film and his first international success.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Director and writers	Neil Jordan; screenplay by Jordan and David Leland¹
Production	HandMade Films and Palace Pictures; producers Patrick Cassavetti and Stephen Woolley; executive producers George Harrison and Denis O'Brien³
Principal cast	Bob Hoskins (George), Cathy Tyson (Simone), Michael Caine (Mortwell), Robbie Coltrane (Thomas), Kate Hardie (Cathy), Clarke Peters (Anderson)⁴
Running time and rating	104 minutes; rated R in the United States⁴
Cannes 1986	Bob Hoskins won the Award for Best Actor (ex-aequo), tied with Michel Blanc for Tenue de soirée⁵
Later honors	Academy Award nomination for Best Actor (1987); BAFTA Film Award for Best Actor, with nominations for Tyson, Jordan, and editor Lesley Walker⁶
US release	June 13, 1986, through Island Pictures; gross of $4.3 million in the United States⁷
Critical standing	98% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer from 41 reviews⁷

Spoilers

Plot

George is released from prison after serving seven years on someone else's behalf. His former wife wants nothing to do with him, and his teenage daughter Jeannie (Zoe Nathenson) does not know him. Desperate for work, he goes to the vice boss Mortwell (Michael Caine), who had duped him into taking the fall, and is assigned to drive Simone between wealthy clients in expensive hotels and private homes, protecting her while he waits.⁸^•⁹

The two begin by bickering; George, a short, fierce Cockney in outdated clothes, is conspicuously out of place in hotel lobbies, and Simone finds him a misfit. A friendship develops from their arguments, and George falls in love with her. Simone asks him to help find Cathy (Kate Hardie), a 15-year-old prostitute from her own days in King's Cross who has fallen under the control of a sadistic pimp. George's search takes him through the sex shops and clip joints of Soho, and when he learns the true nature of Simone and Cathy's relationship he is disillusioned, then devastated when Simone takes matters into her own hands. The final act moves to Brighton, where the truth comes out on the Palace Pier and the film ends with George walking toward the sea.⁸^•⁴^•¹⁰

Production

Origin. Jordan conceived the film after reading a British tabloid report about an ex-felon arrested on an assault charge who claimed he had been protecting prostitutes from their Maltese pimps. Producer Stephen Woolley, who had produced Jordan's The Company of Wolves (1984), felt the item could give London the dramatic presence that Paris had in Le Samouraï (1967) and New York in Taxi Driver (1976). Jordan, who was born in County Sligo and raised in Dublin and knew London poorly, asked the screenwriter David Leland, writer of Alan Clarke's television film Made in Britain (1982), to write a first draft.⁸^•²

Casting George. Leland's draft made George a figure to be feared, close to the pitiless gangster Michael Caine played in Get Carter (1971). Jordan had originally envisaged a story of romantic misapprehension, in which George falls for Simone without realizing until too late that she is besotted with Cathy, and he wanted something more emotional. The script was sent to Bob Hoskins, who had first attracted Jordan's attention in The Long Good Friday (1980) and initially turned the role down as too violent. Jordan visited him at home to ask what was wrong with it; after rewrites, Hoskins took the part.²^•¹¹

Music. The title comes from Nat King Cole's 1950 song "Mona Lisa," written by Ray Evans and Jay Livingston for the film Captain Carey, U.S.A. (1950), which plays throughout the film and underscores George's relationship with Simone; Jordan also used Cole's "When I Fall in Love" and Genesis's hit "In Too Deep." The score is by Michael Kamen.⁸^•³

Style and reception

Critics placed the film in a British noir tradition. Roger Ebert, the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times, wrote that everything in it depends on atmosphere and character, and that it "knows exactly what it is doing," while finding the ending a little too neat.⁴ The BFI describes it as transposing to London some of the plot and aesthetic style of Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976), and notes that its settings and child-prostitution theme were later echoed in London to Brighton (2006).¹ Contemporary British reviewers made the same comparison; the Financial Times called it the nearest a British film had come to a convincing account of urban street life and its corruptions, while Derek Malcolm in The Guardian judged it Jordan's most confident film to that point but his least original.¹²

The response coalesced around Hoskins's performance. David Denby, in New York Magazine, called the film "both tender and acrid," comparing Hoskins's camera-friendly presence to Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney.⁸ The film premiered at Cannes in May 1986, opened in the United States on June 13, 1986, and reached British cinemas in September, becoming one of British cinema's biggest critical hits of the year.¹²^•⁷

Legacy

The film confirmed Jordan as a major British-Irish talent and is widely described as the defining role of Hoskins's career.¹³ It was the second of many collaborations between Jordan and Woolley and their first international success, and it led Jordan to Hollywood work.²^•¹⁴ The Criterion Collection issued a director-approved special edition (Spine #107) with a 2K restoration supervised by Jordan and cinematographer Roger Pratt, and the film streams on HBO Max and BFI Player.³^•⁷

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026