Get Carter Director: Mike Hodges. UK. 1971. 107 min. Michael Caine, Ian Hendry, Britt Ekland, John Osborne, Geraldine Moffat.
Cult classic Get Carter was adapted by writer-director Mike Hodges from Ted Lewis’ 1970 pulp crime novel Jack’s Return Home, based on a real-life killing in County Durham amid internecine turf warfare (also chronicled in Mark Knopfler’s song 5.15am). It tells the story of a powerful London gangster (Michael Caine, by then a major star, in his most iconic performance), returning to his Tyneside home seeking revenge.
The film was made on a low budget in only 36 weeks. Hodges and cinematographer Wolfgang Suschitzky both had a background making documentaries and the film achieves a naturalistic feel: e.g. by using bystanders who happened to be on the Newcastle streets at the time of filming, and by its realistic portrayal of violence. The film captures a Newcastle about to be lost to 1970s urban development - Caine remarked that “I had never witnessed misery like this in my own country. It was like Charles Dickens meets Emily Bronte, written by Edgar Wallace.”
Hodges explained that he wanted to express the changing nature of crime, with the Kray brothers a key influence, e.g. on Carter’s immaculate clothes and sentimentality for family. Caine’s performance also drew on gangsters he had known growing up in Rotherhithe, noting in his autobiography that “I was well aware that gangsters weren’t like the people you saw in the movies … always depicted as either funny or stupid, I knew that was wrong on both counts.”
Get Carter opened to reviews shocked at its brutality and bleakness and lapsed into critical obscurity, but was revived in the 1990s, when filmmakers such as Guy Ritchie and Quentin Tarantino cited it as a key influence. Tarantino, for whom violent revenge is a central theme, named it his favourite British film; Ritchie displayed the Get Carter poster on his office wall and spliced its iconic image of Michael Caine holding a rusty shotgun (with Vinnie Jones replacing Caine) into the Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels poster. It is now regarded as one of the most influential crime films of all time and a pivotal work of British cinema - it even has its own appreciation society.
“Has as much value as a piece of social history as it does a thriller… colder and more brutal than anything British cinema has produced before or since” Michael Hann, Observer ‘The best crime films of all time’
BAFTA Best Supporting Actor nomination (Ian Hendry).
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