Get Carter. 1971. UK. Directed by Mike Hodges. Screenplay by Hodges, based on the novel “Jack’s Return Home” by Ted Lewis. With Michael Caine, Ian Hendry, Britt Ekland. 4K DCP courtesy Warner Brothers. 112 min.
One of the great British postwar crime pics, Get Carter stars Michael Caine as a stone-cold London gangster who returns to his seedy, derelict hometown of Newcastle to investigate and avenge the mysterious death of his brother. Featuring the playwright John Osborne (Look Back in Anger) as a ruthless mob boss; a taut, funky score by Roy Budd; and sleazy, menacing cinematography by Wolfgang Suschinsky, the film stood out by making violence nasty, brutish, and consequential. As Caine mused, “The only film I had ever seen (as a kid growing up in Elephant and Castle) that seemed to me to give a halfway realistic portrait of gangland life was Brighton Rock, the Boulting brothers’ film of Graham Greene’s novel, starring Richard Attenborough.” Together with the producer Michael Klinger, himself once a purveyor of strip clubs and stag films, “I [was] determined to achieve at least as convincing a portrait as that…. [And] Mike Hodges did a great job on the picture, maybe too great since when it came out we were slammed by most of the critics for the violence. It was too realistic for those people who had become used to the choreographed nonsense you usually saw in those days.”