Get Carter (1971)

Saturday is "Take Out The Trash" Day.

  Get Carter (Mike Hodges, 1971) In 2004, BFI Magazine conducted a poll of British film critics of what was the greatest British film of all time.

Out of all British films, the work of Lean and early Hitchcock, The Archers, Carol Reed, Tony Richardson, Ken Russell, the output of Alexander Korda and Ealing Studios and Hammer and Rank, the critics chose Get Carter, a decidedly off-beat and down-beat gangster film that anticipated the odd-ball and ultra-violent Christmas releases of 1971, by 9 months.*

It was the first film of director Mike Hodges, hired at the behest of a producer trying to make a film that would capitalize on the recent conviction of British gangsters, the Kray brothers. Hodges didn't set his film in London, but in the north, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, shooting it almost documentary style, employing locals as extras, and the gangsters aren't robbers, they're integrated into society, supplying the citizenry what they want in vice and taking their cut. There is no law enforcement to be seen and the hoods work in the open, comfortable in their position in society.

Carter reads Raymond Chandler on his way home to Newcastle.
He must think of it as a romance novel.

Jack Carter (Michael Caine) is taking the train from London to his old home-town of Newcastle to arrange and attend his brother Frank's funeral, Frank's death being the result of a drunk-driving accident, officially. Jack isn't buying any of that. Jack, you see, is in the employ of the Fletcher Brothers gang out of London, and he suspects brother Frank was murdered and his other intent to go to Newcastle is to arrange and attend the killing of those responsible. This does not sit well with the Fletcher boys, who want Jack around taking care of their business, so they send out a couple of boys to bring Jack back.

Either that, or they've found out that he's been sleeping with Gerald Fletcher's girlfriend, Anna (Britt Ekland) and plans on running away with her to South America when he returns. Maybe they want to have a "talk" with him before then. It might be that, it might be that he's taken time off from his work for their gang and you just don't do that to the Fletcher's. More than once, anyway.

But, travel, he does, reading Raymond Chandler's "Farewell, My Lovely," perhaps as a primer on how to be a detective trying to solve a mystery, something a bit more intricate and nuanced than being an enforcer/hit-man for the mob. And he will have to be a detective: the story he unfolds is complicated with agendas that are hidden as well as obvious, as crime happens out in the open and is part of the fabric of day-to-day Newcastle—as far afield as one could get from the London that had become familiar to audiences of the Swinging '60's—it's not psychedelia and mini-skirts and free-wheeling poshness, but grubby and constricting and hiding in the shadows.

The plot is as convoluted as a Chandler novel, and with family just as embedded in the gears of it. At the funeral, Jack meets Frank's mistress (the last of them, anyway) Margaret (Dorothy White), and his own niece Doreen (Petra Markham), Frank's daughter (although, even that's unclear). They give him an added incentive, certainly, but, as Jack digs deeper, he finds the task more labyrinthine with players, subterfuge, hidden motives, and where he becomes the convenient means to others' ends in the midst of turf-wars and long-held vendettas. Jack leaves a bloody trail of bodies in his path to vengeance, cutting a swath through the Newcastle underworld, to the point where he himself becomes a target for his bosses, who send a couple of underlings to bring him back, dead or alive not a consideration given his activities.

But, they're just another road-block on his hunt, and although he might be an efficient and remorseless killer, the very fact that he's so committed to his task reveals that he has one weakness—family. And his distance and isolation in London has kept him from knowing the seamier sides of his brother's past, from which no one is left untarnished. If Carter starts out with any sentimentality before getting to Newcastle, he loses it the deeper he digs and the closer he gets to the truth.

Conversely, the scope of his work expands to the point where it is not enough to deal with his brother's killer (or killers), but also to set up and exact revenge on the whole network of criminality through planted evidence and black-mail, reaching up to its highest ranks in Cyril Kinnear (played in an eccentric performance by playwright John Osborne), using evidence he's found along the way and using—of all people—the police to handle the more difficult work.

One wonders where Carter thinks this all headed—yes, he's planning on retiring to South America with Anna (and maybe niece Doreen)—but he acts with such a pitiless ruthlessness that one wonders if he actually can make a plan more than one target away. His defection from the Fletchers for his "personal time" and his dalliance with Anna will surely make him a perpetual target. If he's capable of such dogged retribution, wouldn't they be as well?

Get Carter is a tough film to follow, given the number of players involved in the web of criminality that finally did in brother Frank, but eventually it comes down to just latching onto Caine's Avenging Devil and holding on tight, the surrounding characters aren't going to last very long, anyway, and given their lack of screen-time, there's no danger of attachment, even if any of them were in the slightest bit sympathetic. One almost needs a Newcastle map to keep track of it.

Hodges isn't much of a help. This is his first film and one can see that he's trying to maintain the threads of the story and the many characters by any means necessary. Every so often, there's a wonderful shot that neatly framed and composed for both atmosphere and efficient exposition. But, a lot of the time, it feels a bit slap-dash, even random, as if Hodges were trying to make something off-beat but with no underlying story-telling need behind it, lest any veneer betray the location work and the underlying seediness of the story.

There would be no sequel. But, there would be a remake in 2000, directed by Stephen Kay and starring Sylvester Stallone (with a cameo by Caine, of all people). One wonders why, if this film is held in such high regard, it was even necessary. The second had that polish that I profess missing, but even that doesn't make it a better film than the original. 

* Really. Does anyone wonder how Brexit happened?