Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Get Carter by Ted Lewis [PDF] Get Carter Book by Ted Lewis Free Download (224 pages) Free download or read online Get Carter pdf (ePUB) book. The first edition of the novel was published in January 1st 1970, and was written by Ted Lewis. The book was published in multiple languages including English, consists of 224 pages and is available in Paperback format. The main characters of this mystery, crime story are , . The book has been awarded with , and many others. Get Carter PDF Details. Author: Ted Lewis Original Title: Get Carter Book Format: Paperback Number Of Pages: 224 pages First Published in: January 1st 1970 Latest Edition: 1992 Series: Jack Carter #1 Language: English category: mystery, crime, fiction, thriller, mystery, noir, mystery, novels, action, culture, film, thriller, mystery thriller, european literature, british literature Formats: ePUB(Android), audible mp3, audiobook and kindle. The translated version of this book is available in Spanish, English, Chinese, Russian, Hindi, Bengali, Arabic, Portuguese, Indonesian / Malaysian, French, Japanese, German and many others for free download. Please note that the tricks or techniques listed in this pdf are either fictional or claimed to work by its creator. We do not guarantee that these techniques will work for you. Some of the techniques listed in Get Carter may require a sound knowledge of Hypnosis, users are advised to either leave those sections or must have a basic understanding of the subject before practicing them. DMCA and Copyright : The book is not hosted on our servers, to remove the file please contact the source url. If you see a Google Drive link instead of source url, means that the file witch you will get after approval is just a summary of original book or the file has been already removed. Get Carter. Reassessing the classic Brit noir film and the Ted Lewis novel it was based on, with director Mike Hodges and philosopher John Gray among Matthew Sweet's guests. The film starring Michael Caine was adapted from a 1970 Ted Lewis novel set in an underworld of gangsters and teenage pornography. Mike Hodges, Nick Triplow, Pamela Hutchinson and John Gray talk with Matthew Sweet about the influence of the book and film. Originally set in Scunthorpe, Lewis's novel Jack's Return Home was relocated to Newcastle/Gateshead for the film which Mike Hodges adapted and directed. A series of events marking what would have been Ted Lewis's 80th birthday are taking place at Scunthorpe, Newcastle, Barton- upon-Humber and Hull. Jack's Return Home (1970) was published in 1971 as Carter and later re-published as Get Carter after the film was made. Nick Triplow is the author of a biography Getting Carter: Ted Lewis and the Birth of Brit Noir. CIS: The novels of Ted Lewis, a doomed genius. What is it about brilliant writing and alcohol? Men like Faulkner, Thomas, Poe, Chandler, Capote, Hemingway and Joyce were no stranger to the bottle. Meanwhile, Patricia Highsmith said that strong drink enabled her to “…see the truth, the simplicity, and the primitive emotions once more.” One of the giants of English Noir crime writing, Derek Raymond, seems to have been in an alcoholic haze for most of his adult life. So, what do we make of the short life of Ted Lewis who died at the tragically young age of 42 from an alcohol related illness? Lewis was born in Manchester in 1940. His family moved to the Lincolnshire town of Barton-on-Humber in 1947, and Lewis’s formative years were spent in the distinctly unfashionable milieu of what we now call Humberside. Despite his parents’ objections, Lewis spent four years at Hull Art School. His experiences there make up the narrative of his autobiographical tale of young men and their relationships, All the Way Home and All the Night Through , which was published in 1965. The creation of Carter By this time Lewis was working as an animator in London, but in 1970, Michael Joseph published the novel for which Lewis is best remembered – Jack’s Return Home , which was filmed as Get Carter in 1971. The title poses a conundrum. In 1960, Tony Hancock and his crew recorded a spoof melodrama, as part of The East Cheam Drama Festival. It’s title? Jack’s Return Home . If you want a good giggle, click the link, and you will be transported back to a Golden Age of English humour. Did Lewis borrow the title from scriptwriters Alan Simpson and Ray Galton? I think the clue comes near the beginning of Jack’s Return Home, when Jack Carter goes through his late brother’s record collection, and finds an LP called This is Hancock, probably the fictional version of Pieces of Hancock, which contains the East Cheam Drama Festival sketch. Get Carter is a screen classic, and was in third place in our list of the 20 greatest classic crime movies. The storyline is well known, but the brief outline is that Jack Carter, a London gangland enforcer, returns to his home town in North East England to investigate the suspicious death of his brother and in doing so sets himself on a collision course with local criminals. The film does diverge from the book, however. It is set in Newcastle, but Lewis makes it very clear that the Carters’ home patch is Scunthorpe. Director Mike Hodges, did not take the risk of using the Lincolnshire steel town as a location. Mostly because of its name, Scunthorpe has something of a comical reputation, and the eventual setting of Newcastle offered much more in the way of visually iconic scenery. Also, the book has the time and the space to explore the ambivalent relationship between Jack and Frank Carter. Brothers, and yet complete opposites in lifestyle choices and character. Brothers divided by career, but bound together by shared childhood happiness. The Jack Carter Trilogy comprises two more episodes in Carter’s career. Jack Carter’s Law (1974) is a prequel to Jack’s Return Home, while Jack Carter and The Mafia Pigeon (1977) is an attempt to make Carter’s world a little more cosmopolitan, as he is sent on an enforced holiday to a Spanish resort and has to deal with some dangerous foreign villains. Both books are widely considered to be much weaker than the original novel. Be this as it may, despite a pretty dire Hollywood remake of Get Carter, Ted Lewis’s stock is still quite high in America and this autumn sees his three Jack Carter novels reprinted as high quality paperbacks by Syndicate Books, which also brought out a new edition of GBH earlier this year. Introducing Plender In Plender, (1971) Lewis offered not a sequel, but a searching look at a criminal world where violence is a way of life.There is a slightly less grounded feel to the book, as Plender – who is violent just like Carter – does not work for common or garden gangsters like Jack Carter’s Fletcher brothers. Instead, he is employed as a small cog in a huge criminal enterprise known only as The Movement. Billy Rags (1973) starts in a maximum security prison, and follows Billy Cracken as he breaks out of jail in an ultimately doomed attempt to make the world dance to his tune. Before we look at Lewis’s final work we need to mention two curiosities. In Boldt (1976) the author takes us to the USA, and critics have said that the tale of a white cop in a mid-western town is informed more by TV and movie cliches than any real sense of the authentic America. The Rabbit (1975) covers similar ground to Lewis’s first novel in that it explores the world of young men growing up in post-war provincial England. The absence of professional criminals from the narrative does not mean a lack of cruelty – either physical or psychological. And GBH… By 1980. Ted Lewis had been sucked into a spiral of alcohol dependence. He was separated from his wife and family and, despite the fame afforded him by the success of Get Carter, had returned to north Lincolnshire, and was living with his mother in Scunthorpe, where he died in 1982. GBH was published in 1980, and in many ways, it is Lewis’s apotheosis. The central character, George Fowler, is not a gun-for-hire but boss of his own criminal empire. The book relates the slow unraveling of Fowler’s world. The writing is lean, muscular and elemental, and there is not a word or phrase wasted. The sense of alienation is heightened by the chapter headings which simply alternate between The Smoke, and The Sea. The Smoke is, of course, Fowler’s London heartland, but The Sea is the bleak landscape of an out of season seaside town – Mablethorpe. The Lincolnshire resort is somewhere that Lewis would almost certainly have visited in his childhood summers, but its tawdry, windswept and wintry dereliction is the perfect backdrop for Fowler’s downfall. So, what is Ted Lewis’s legacy? His writing lit a torch for those who sought to explore the darker places in men’s souls, and Raymond Chandler’s words, “ The crime story tips violence out of its vase on the shelf, and pours it back down into the street where it belongs, ” might be an appropriate epitaph. It may be that authors cannot write with the violent intensity that Lewis used and remain sociable and sane, but let the last words come from another Noir genius, Derek Raymond. In his afterword to GBH he said: “ He is an example of how dangerous writing can be when it is done properly, and Ted Lewis’s writing proves he never ran away from the page. No – because with Ted Lewis, the page was the battle .” Get Carter by Ted Lewis: Crime Fiction’s Open Source Blueprint. I’ll get right to the point here; Ted Lewis’s 1970 novel Jack’s Return Home (re-titled Get Carter so I’ll call it that from here on) is one of the most influential works of crime fiction in existence. In the world of U.K. hardboiled literature it’s had the kind of impact that books by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler had on the genre in the U.S. In the new edition of Get Carter being put out by Syndicate Books, the back cover and inside pages contain jaw-dropping laudatory praise of the novel by the likes of Derek Raymond , Stuart Neville , Dennis Lehane , James Sallis , and John Williams , the last of whom says Lewis’s book is “the finest British crime novel ever written.” When I researched Lewis’s life and work several years back, one person I interviewed was David Peace ; Peace told me, about Get Carter , “I very consciously used it as a blueprint for Nineteen Seventy-Four , my first novel.” Before further discussion of the book, I’m going to pause and say a few things about the film that shares its title. Because you can’t say the words Get Carter without thinking of the 1971 big screen feature that stars Michael Caine and was directed by Mike Hodges (Hodges supplies the foreword to the new edition of the book). I’m not going to go into any detail about the movie, because a prolonged analysis or appreciation of it deserves its own space. Suffice to say that it is not only a classic film; it’s an institution. It holds high places on best-ever film lists issued by entities such as The British Film Institute, Empire magazine, Time Out , and The Guardian . If you’ve seen the movie, you likely don’t need me to try and convince you of its quality. If you haven’t, and if you care anything about film noir, gangster cinema, Michael Caine, or classic films period, just go watch it. If you’re like I was after my first viewing, when it’s over you’ll find you have a hankering to run it again. Ok so back to Lewis’s novel. So what’s so great about it, why has it influenced so many? For me, it’s the layers. Taken at face value as a work of crime fiction, it is a supremely excellent example of such a book. It has everything lovers of noir lit want in their reads of that kind. It’s lean and mean, raw, gritty, unsentimental, and, like many of Lewis’s novels (there are only nine that were published, as he died of alcoholism-related complications at age 42), it jumps into a bracingly intense place in its very first paragraphs and remains in that fierce space throughout. For those who haven’t read the book or seen the film, the story is about (and the novel is narrated by) Jack Carter, who’s the top enforcer for a London-based organized crime outfit headed up by two brothers (I have heard that Lewis was personally acquainted with the Krays). Jack is originally from northern England and his lone sibling, his brother Frank, never left their hometown in that part of the country. At the outset of the tale, all of which takes place over one long weekend, Frank has just died. Jack’s thoughts and feelings about his brother’s passing are no normal bereavement state, though. When Jack learns that Frank apparently perished in a drunk-driving incident in which he was on his own, he knows something’s amiss. Frank was always a careful, tidy, clean-living kind of fella, and the idea of him engaging in that kind of drunkenly reckless behavior is just too far-fetched for Jack to accept. Something else Jack knows is that the bar where Frank worked was owned by northern associates of Jack’s bosses. Jack assumes that the local syndicate from his hometown must have had something to do with what he believes was the arranged death of his brother. Against the wishes of his employers, who prefer that he not stir up trouble in the northern territories, he goes home to conduct a vigilante investigation. Jack quickly learns that he was right in what he assumed about Frank’s death, and when he gathers just how many tiers there were to the buildup that led to his brother being offed, how many unsavory characters were in on the plot, he has quite a lot of items on his revenge-fueled to-do list. So there’s that about Get Carter : it is a finely written crime novel. But there are other commendable aspects of the book. One of these is its exploration of the relationship between Jack and Frank. That part of the story is just as much what really drives the book as Lewis’s close looks into the workings of England’s criminal underworld. If Jack simply loved his dear brother and was bitterly grieving over his set-up death, that would be one thing. But Jack’s and Frank’s siblinghood was actually far from wholesomely close-knit. The brothers didn’t get along, to say the least. Jack has always been rough around the edges and this didn’t sit well with the methodical, judgmental, aloof Frank. Here, let me shut up and allow Jack to tell you how it was between them: Those were the best times I ever had as a lad. Just alone with Frank down on the river. But that was before he’d begun to hate my guts. Not that I’d exactly been full of brotherly love for him before I’d left the town. He’d been so fucking po-faced about everything. Siding with our dad all the time, although never hardly saying anything. He’d just let me know by the way he’d looked at me. Maybe that’s why I hated him sometimes: I could tell how right he thought he was about me. All of the bad feelings between Jack and Frank elevate to a point of irreconcilable differences when it comes out, in their adult years, that Frank’s daughter might very well be Jack’s; Jack had a spontaneous, alcohol-induced foray with Frank’s fiancée not long before their wedding. The daughter, Doreen, is 15 at the time of Get Carter and she’s very much an integral part of the story. You get the sense that when Jack starts in on wanting to rub out the people who were responsible for his brother’s death, he’s actually attacking something deep in his own blackened heart. If there’s any fault at all to be found in Hodges’s film in comparison to Lewis’s book, it’s that the movie doesn’t fully explore the complicated relationship between the Carter brothers. Another element of Get Carter that makes it such a remarkable book is its atmosphere. Lewis, who was a gifted visual artist, combined his considerable writing talent with his eye for graphic images, to pen some evocative passages that give the reader a clear optical sense of the setting and people who inhabit the story. Specifically, we see, hear, and smell the grim environs and sleazy denizens of Jack’s northern hometown. Or we see and feel experiences like his train ride from London to the town. Listen to him: At first there’s just the blackness. The rocking of the train, the reflections against the raindrops and the blackness. But if you keep looking beyond the reflections you eventually notice the glow creeping into the sky. At first it’s slight and you think maybe a haystack or a petrol tanker or something is on fire somewhere over a hill and out of sight. But then you notice that the clouds themselves are reflecting the glow and you know that it must be something bigger. And a little later the train passes through a cutting and curves away towards the town, a small bright concentrated area of light and beyond and around the town you can see the causes of the glow, the half-dozen steelworks stretching to the rim of the semicircular bowl of hills, flames shooting upwards – soft reds pulsing on the insides of melting shops, white heat sparking in blast furnaces – the structures of the works against the collective glow, all of it looking like a Disney version of the Dawn of Creation. Finally, a facet of the novel that gives it much of its lasting strength is its view of time and place. In the foreword Hodges writes eloquently about this aspect of Lewis’s book. Through Jack Carter’s eyes we see that England at the close of the 1960s was not at all just bright colors and pop groups and a sense of the chance of prosperity for all. There was an underbelly to all of that and it was either thriving or remaining stubbornly alive through the era. Lewis handles this duality and those false facades by contrasting things like the “Walker Brothers haircuts” of some of the younger men, the “pop colours” to be found in illustrations at public places, and the band posters up in Doreen’s bedroom, with harsh descriptions of steelworks settings; offsets visions of the lavish surroundings being enjoyed by the northern gangsters who are prospering in their black market dealings, with descriptions of the seedy pubs from which they draw some of their income. And so on. Lewis’s/Carter’s outlook on all this is piercing, it’s unforgiving, and its relentlessness is so much of what makes Get Carter a seminal groundbreaker. Here’s Jack’s take on some of the people he encounters in a casino run by the head gang boss from the northern town: I looked around the room and saw the wives of the new Gentry. Not one of them was not overdressed. Not one of them looked as though they were not sick to their stomachs with jealousy of someone or something. They’d had nothing when they were younger, since the war they’d gradually got the lot, and the change had been so surprising they could never stop wanting, never be satisfied. They were the kind of people who made me know I was right. It’s interesting that Lewis, who was the son of a workingman (his father managed laborers at a rock quarry around their hometown of Barton- Upon-Humber, in North Lincolnshire) and who was a sensitive art college graduate, wrote so convincingly about gangsters, or that he even took up the challenge. Lewis’s first novel, All the Way Home and All the Night Through (1965), Get Carter’s predecessor in his personal canon, is a blatantly autobiographical work of coming-of-age literary fiction. Later in his writing career, Lewis revisited that same kind of terrain in authoring the similar yet superior 1975 novel The Rabbit , which is a classic of gritty English kitchen sink drama, on a par with titles such as Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and Stan Barstow’s A Kind of Loving , etc. But there are clues to why Lewis chose to author Get Carter , which led to him writing six other crime novels over his short life. One is his love of Chandler, a love that seems to have been engendered in part by Lewis’s boyhood schoolteacher Henry Treece, a noted writer who had a large impact on Lewis’s life, and whom read Chandler to his students, using an American accent. Another hint is Lewis’s great love of cinema and particularly of shoot-‘em-up films; a college friend of Lewis’s told me about the countless hours they spent watching movies at the cinema in Hull where they went to art school together, and he mentioned that High Noon was a particular favorite of Lewis’s. In a 1980 article in the Scunthorpe Evening Telegraph newspaper, a piece that was done on the eve of the publication of Lewis’s last (and, to my mind, best) novel GBH , and just two years before his death, Lewis had these things to say about Jack Carter and the first of his three novels centered around that character: “I suppose the time was ripe for Carter,” and “You could describe Carter as an anti-hero. He has no redeeming features . . . But I used some license by giving him a sardonic and cynical sense of humour, which made his character more palatable to the reader.” Indeed. As is true of other Lewis novels, highly effective stinging humor is sprinkled throughout Get Carter . Michael Caine in Get Carter (1971). Lewis had an encyclopedic knowledge of the history of cinema and he loved to play trivia games based on questions about the movies. His college friend told me that he dreamed of being a filmmaker. Naturally, such a person would be thrilled with the advent of his second novel being made into a major feature film starring Michael Caine. But for Lewis one part of Hodges’s adaptation always nagged at him: the northern locale. Although the town in the book is never named, Lewis meant it to be placed in his own home area of North Lincolnshire. The author, who lived in London and other parts of southern England during his post-collegiate and early writing life, and who spent his last years back in Barton-Upon- Humber, had a great attachment to his home turf. Some of the physical descriptions in Get Carter are based squarely on places in North Lincolnshire, just as several of the characters in the book are named after Lewis’s childhood friends from Barton-Upon-Humber. But Hodges had his reasons for moving the northern setting to Newcastle-Upon-Tyne (he explains in the foreword). And while it’s difficult to find any flaws in the backdrop of the film, Lewis never stopped wondering why it couldn’t have been shot in the place where he meant the story to occur. In that same newspaper article mentioned above he is quoted as saying, “Scunthorpe as a town is very interesting with its steelworks, one main street in the centre, and the rows of Victorian terraced houses. I thought it would have made a dramatic backdrop for the film. People are accustomed to seeing violence played out in spectacular locations, but to have set the film in Scunthorpe I believe would have been a good counter-point.” Ok, so that’s my take on Get Carter . If you care to read my overview of Lewis’s full writing career, see this Hall-of-Famer post I did on him, it being my debut article for this site. This sweepstakes has ended. Check our Sweepstakes Page for other enticing chances to win! Comment below for a chance to win a copy of Get Carter by Ted Lewis . To enter, make sure you're a registered member of the site and simply leave a comment below. TIP: Since only comments from registered users will be tabulated, if your user name appears in red above your comment— STOP —go log in, then try commenting again. If your user name appears in black above your comment, You’re In ! Fifty Years Later, Get Carter Is Still the Iconic British Gangster Film. I can’t remember when I first heard of Mike Hodges’s seminal 1971 British gangster film, Get Carter , but it was long before I finally managed to see it late one night on cable television in a hotel in Prague in the late 1990s. And it was several more years until I was able to track down a copy of the then relatively rare source novel of the film, Ted Lewis’s Jack’s Return Home , published in 1970. Until the last half decade or so, Get Carter as the book would subsequently be retitled and how it will be referred to it in this piece, along with Lewis’s eight other novels, were all out of print and little known. This is despite the praise heaped on them by luminaries such as David Peace, Dennis Lehane, Derek Raymond and James Sallis, for being formative in the creation of modern British noir. Get Carter and its two sequels, Jack Carter’s Law (1974) and Jack Carter and the Mafia Pigeon (1976) were reissued digitally and in paperback in 2014. Lewis’s other notable works, Plender (1971), and his last and probably darkest book, GBH (1980), have also been re-released. The film, starring Michael Caine in the title role, is now also easy to find. The film adaptation premiered half a century ago on March 7th in the UK and in the US two weeks later on March 18th. Although a financial success, it received a lukewarm reception from critics, and languished until it attracted cult status with the “Cool Britannia” movement and the associated rise of gangster chic in the 1990s. The most prominent homage to Get Carter and the fashion and cadence of Britain’s 1960s underworld culture, Guy Ritchie’s 1998 film Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels , resulted in a slew of forgettable knock offs. There was even a CD released in 1999, Product of The Environment , in which notorious London underworld figures from the era performed spoken word stories to the music of British rapper Tricky. The novel’s main character, Jack Carter, is an enforcer for a criminal organisation run by two brothers, Gerald and Les Fletcher. The story opens with Jack leaving London and traveling to the unnamed industrial working-class town in northern England where he grew up, to investigate the death of his estranged brother, Frank. Drunk on whisky, Frank drove his car off a cliff, an incident the police have labelled an accidental but which Jack, aware his brother never touched alcohol, views more suspiciously. As Jack puts it: “They hadn’t even bothered to be careful; they hadn’t even bothered to be clever.” Jack proceeds to take apart ‘they’, the organisation that runs the town’s criminal activities, which he holds responsible for his brother’s death, culminating in a violent and ambiguous ending. Other key characters include Kinnear, the local crime lord, Margaret, Frank’s mistress, and his brother’s teenage daughter, Doreen, who it is clearly implied is actually Jack’s daughter from a drunken fling he had with Frank’s wife and the reason for the brother’s estrangement. The follow up novels are both prequels and decline in quality with each instalment. Jack Carter’s Law is set in London’s vice district of Soho and sees Jack attempting to track down a criminal informant who has information that could put his bosses in jail, at the same time as carrying on an affair with Audrey, Gerald’s wife and plotting to rip off his employers. Jack Carter and the Mafia Pidgeon almost completely plays it for laughs with a story about Jack being dispatched to a villa in Spain to bodyguard a Mafia informant. Lewis’s biographer Nick Triplow has asserted the ground-breaking nature of the first Jack Carter book lies in its depiction of a different kind of literary criminal, more cunning, ruthless and violent. The setting was different from much that had come before, a grim northern England industrial town, and Lewis infused the story with a razor-sharp analysis of the shifting political economy of organised crime in the UK as the 1960s ended. Linked to this, the novel captures the shifting class changes under way as the UK moved into the 1970s, when post-war austerity crossed over into economic prosperity and along with it, developments such as sexual liberation gradually crept into the regions. The film version was shot in 40 days at a total cost of US$750,000. Producer Michael Klinger, whose CV had included the Roman Polanski films Repulsion (1965—for which he was uncredited) and Cul-De-Sac (1966), as well as the risqué exploitation documentary Primitive London (1965), wanted to capitalise on significant public interest generated by the trial of the real-life gangland duo, Ronald and Reginald Kray (the inspiration for Jack’s thoroughly nouveau riche gangster bosses, the Fletchers). Klinger asked Hodges, who until then had only worked in television, to direct. Hodges kept the basic story of Lewis’s book and much of the dialogue and removed the rest. The setting became the industrial centre of Newcastle (or Newcastle Upon Tyne, as it is now known). Jack’s relationship with Doreen is merely hinted at, and Jack’s fate at the end is made clear when he is killed by an assassin, presumably operating at the behest of the Fletchers. A relatively straight forward revenge story, the film’s narrative power derives from the collision between the grim working-class world of Jack’s youth and modern 1970s Britain. If anything, it is even tougher than the book. Scenes such as Jack throwing a businessman from an elevated carpark, and his reaction to discovering Doreen has been coerced into appearing in a porn film, still pack emotional punch. The uniformly bleak northern setting is infused with Hodges’s experience as a conscript in the Royal Navy in the late 1950s, during which time he regularly docked at tough, impoverished northern port towns. This verisimilitude is further enhanced by Caine, who claimed to have based Jack’s character on a London gangland figure he knew, “dress, attitude, frame of mind, talk—even the walk”. There are also resemblances to Lewis’s life; a fondness for booze and cigarettes, habits which would eventually kill him at the age of just forty-two, and time spent rubbing up against unsavoury aspects of British society. As Triplow put it to me in a 2020 interview: ‘There’s enough autobiographical detail in there to suggest he [Lewis] was weaving his own experience through the narrative. He was working in Soho in the lead up to writing Carter and rubbing shoulders with minor villains in various pubs and clubs. His friend and colleague, Tom Barling, introduced him to his own underworld connections. Exactly how far he took those associations, who knows? There are different versions. But it’s worth bearing in mind that ever since he was a kid, Lewis had always been drawn towards taking risks.’ In his 2014 study of British crime cinema, Paul Elliott states: ‘The British gangster film may often be unfavourably compared with its Hollywood cousin but in its depiction of evolving notions of masculinity, its discussion of social anxieties and its exposition of nationality, it is a valuable mirror to a Britain that is both fascinated and repulsed by its dark past.’ He further notes that the ‘iconography of Get Carter (the suit, the shotgun, the beer in the thin glass) have become cliches of British crime cinema and arguably served to obscure and overstate the film’s importance in the development of the form.’ While Get Carter was by no means the first and is probably not even the best British gangster film, it is certainly among the most influential. The lineage of British gangster cinema stretches back to the 1930s but was given its first full blooded treatment in a cycle of three post war films that drew condemnation from censors, moralists and film critics for their depiction of sex and violence and their bleak take on post-war British life: They Made Me a Fugitive (1947) or I Became a Criminal , the title it was known by in the US, No Orchids for Miss Blandish , and Brighton Rock (both of which appeared in 1948). Other prominent entries include Joseph Losey’s The Criminal (1960) and Peter Yates’s dramatization of the Great Train Robbery, Robbery (1967). Both films starred Stanley Baker, who was instrumental in bringing a tougher, glamorous but also more working-class version of British criminality to the big screen. As Elliot points out, Get Carter was itself part of loose cycle of three prominent early 1970s British gangland films, sandwiched between the counterculture influenced Performance (1970) and Michael Tuchner’s viscerally nasty Villain (1971). Get Carter’s British cinematic influences were supplemented by a wider cross pollination, American film noir and films like John Boorman’s 1967 movie Point Blank , which Lewis was a major fan of. Get Carter feeds into another key strand of British gangster cinema, the criminal as hungry entrepreneur, a trait made more overt in Villain’s central character, Vic Dakin, a gay, psychopathic right-wing gangster, and reaching its apotheosis, a year after Margaret Thatcher took power in 1979, in Bob Hoskin’s 1980 portrayal of Harold Shand in John MacKenzie’s The Long Good Friday . MGM commissioned director George Armitage to give Get Carter a blaxsploitation overlay, resulting in the 1972 film, Hit Man , about a black assassin who travels to Southern California for the funeral of his brother and becomes obsessed with tracking down the individuals responsible for his death. Hodges’s effort was also remade as an entirely unremarkable film in 2000 starring Sylvester Stallone. Get Carter has been credited as a key influence in the popular 1970s British television crime show The Sweeney , which featured two tough, rule breaking police detectives. In addition to those already namechecked— Villain , The Long Good Friday , Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and its various imitators—strong trace elements of Get Carter can be found in Michael Apted’s little known The Squeeze (1977), Stephen Frears’s The Hit (1984), Jonathan Glazer’s Sexy Beast (2000), and Shane Meadow’s Dead Man’s Shoes (2004). Sexy Beast and its depiction of retired working-class British gangsters living in sun drenched retirement in Spain, can almost be viewed as a parallel cinematic world for Jack Carter, had he lived long enough.