Reviews
Get Carter By Alexander Walker
Public terrorism came to London in the Seventies. The 'Affluent Society' of Swinging London swiftly turned into the Violent Society. Letter bombs at prominent addresses, Pakistani dissidents shot dead at the Indian High Commission, machine-gun attacks on Middle East embassies... And as violence grew more perceptible, films put the emphasis of interest on the anti-romantic anti-hero, rooted in the London of the Krays but demonstrating his ugly skills with the verisimilitude now being practised in Hollywood.
Mike Hodges's Get Carter and Michael Tuchner's Villain opened within weeks of each other in the spring of 1971. Both studied the British criminal in his native habitat, borrowed from the manners and verbals of South London - courtesy of Charles Kray's Old Bailey testimony, but falling sadly short of that man's affectionate view of his siblings.
Hodges turned a Sixties character round in his tracks, sending Michael Caine's petty-criminal-made-bad-but-rich back to the North to avenge a family murder. Caine was the 'hard man', devoid of self-pity or mercy, who might have had Alfie as his weakling brother. It is one of his landmark performances. John Osborne, now adorned with the Edwardian beard he was to wear off-screen for most of the rest of his life, is the ice-cool boss of the Newcastle heavy mob.
Caine is shown with his nose in Chandler's Farewell, My Lovely. But if the film has any flaws, it is here. No sympathy, no humanity is shown by him to any baddie: he is no Marlowe. He knifes one man in the heart, pushes another off a multi-storey car park, sends a third out to sea in a shale-truck dumper, very dead, shoots a fourth in a ferry-boat ambush, drowns one girl by accident and another on purpose. There's also very little sex, save for the curiously sanitised form of Britt Ekland talking dirty over the telephone.
It is hard to evaluate Get Carter without misgivings. It began the on-rush into medical materialism in ultraviolent movies - the injuries people inflicted on each other and on a society self-destructively bent on inflicting the maximum damage on its own democratic organs. A brutal film, yes; a visionary one, yes indeed. It showed us what was coming.
Review
Before Quentin Tarantino was first bullied at high school, Mike Hodges was making a seminal designer gangster film. But the violence in Get Carter isn't cartoon violence. It's the real, visceral fist-on-face, misanthropic type, from an age before people got desensitised and postmodern about bad men hurting each other in the movies. The keen sense of style (the suits, the guns, the sleazy sex, the sharp "you slaaaag" dialogue), the time (mid-sexual/drugs revolution - see teenage house party, porn vids, bored landladies and casual adultery) and the place (Grimupnorth in excelsis, terraces, declining industry and the atmospheric score) makes this still stand up as a classic Britflick.
It's a thoroughly nasty film - the wry humour and lovable-rogues-win-through levity of modern capers is startlingly absent. Caine isn't that great an actor, but he gives good persona, and this film colours the Caine caricature as much as anything he's done. He's both hero and anti-hero - supposedly moral and vengeful but with a brutal, misogynist streak, with skeletons waiting to jump out of any given closet. It's that kind of depth to the plot, the complex characterisation and emotional subtext, eerie atmosphere and realistic period backdrop that make this so much more than Lock Stock And Two UK Gold Repeats. He's a big, baaad man. And he's still in good shape.
Review
As gritty as a sand pit, this is one tough film. Set in Newcastle (industrial city in the North-West of England), this is part gangster thriller and part kitchen sink drama. Michael Caine gives what I believe to be his best ever performance as the mob heavy going home for his brother's funeral. It turns into a hunt for his brother's killer that sets him against local criminals in a seedy world of porn and gambling. Caine basically spends the film being hard as nails and beating people up, and the film comes to a very violent conclusion. If nothing else, it's worth watching just to see Alf from Coronation Street get slapped around. 10/10.
Review
A vicious London gangster, Jack Carter, travels to Newcastle for his brother's funeral. He begins to suspect that his brother's death was not an accident and sets out to follow a complex trail of lies, deceit, cover-ups and backhanders through Newcastle's underworld, leading, he hopes, to the man who ordered his brother killed. Because of his ruthlessness Carter exhibits all the unstopability of the android in Terminator, or Walker in Point Blank, and he and the other characters in the film are prone to sudden, brutal acts of violence.
Review
Get Carter is the British Gangland film at it's very best. Based on Ted Lewis' "Jack's Return Home" It tells the violent story of Jack Carter - a tough Enforcer who works for the Fletcher Brothers. Having found out that his brother has died under strange circumstances, Carter travels north to his home city of Newcastle to find out what happened. But the local underworld are going to make sure that Carter never knows the truth. Filmed in 1971 by Mike Hodges, this is a tough and uncompromising look into a world that very few people know of. A world where people live on the peripheries of violence and respectability.
By Alan Gerrard.
