Irishman Neil Jordan’s third feature stars Bob Hoskins as a driver, bodyguard and prospective lover to a high-echelon sex worker in a seedy (and thoroughly phantasmatic) 1980s London. “I had this image of the city in my mind,” the Dublin-born director explains. “It’s very difficult to photograph London. It’s not like New York, with these angular facets to it. I had this feeling … of a great metropolis with all these lovely shadows and secrets behind the public surface.” In Jordan’s London, human trafficking and petty gangsterism abound, with Hoskins called upon to rescue love interest Simone—Cathy Tyson in her remarkable cinema debut—from the throes of Michael Caine’s underground overlord. Jordan’s first internationally acclaimed film owes much to the electrifyingly ruffian Hoskins, whose amalgam of vulgarity and chic elevates the fast-paced nouveau-noir into more than an exercise in genre or an ode to the dimly lit alleys of King’s Cross and Soho. If Hoskins supplies the unrefined poise, Nat King Cole’s sumptuous song lends the drama its title and saccharine air. In the 2010s, Larry Jordan was slated to direct a remake (reportedly featuring Mickey Rourke and Eva Green), yet the project never came to fruition, leaving Mona Lisa as London’s definitive sex industry thriller.