Get Carter

Thy holy cities are a wilderness, Zion is a wilderness, Jerusalem a desolation.

     Saturday afternoon, I'm on the sofa, and in search of a film.  The television has nothing to offer me, so I turn to BBC iplayer, and my eyes light upon 'Get Carter'.  Mike Hodges' brilliant, brutal film of 1971.

     I have watched this film plenty of times.  I'm slightly surprised I haven't blogged about the film before.  It is a hard and uncompromising film.  Brutal and cynical, that has, I think rightly, been likened to a Jacobean Tragedy.  And tragedy it is.  There is a very high body count.

     'Get Carter' was, as far as I can remember, a bit of a cause celebre, when it first came out.  The critic Pauline Kael said of it, 'sadism-for-the-connoisseur [] so calculatedly cool and soulless and nastily erotic that it seems to belong to a new genre of virtuosic viscousness.' It has since then become a cult movie, and also a shorthand for the excesses of early 1970s British films.  It is also a paradox also for being simultaneously a product of the then past decade - the depiction sex, drugs, and pornography - and a criticism of it.  'Get Carter  is, along with two films I have reviewed before on this blog - 'The Ballad of Tam Lin' and 'Straight on till Morning', a prime example of the 'Sixties Hangover Film'.  A rather niche genre, but interesting. And may be important.

     The Carter in question, Jack, works for London organised crime, in the shape of Gerald Fletcher.  He is, as you might reasonably expect, a man of violence.  In an inspired title sequence we travel with Carter back home, to an British unnamed city somewhere in the North of England, to bury his brother Ted.  Carter is already suspicious of his brother's dead, and events confirm his doubts.  The funeral is perfunctory and sparsely attended; Ted's girlfriend, Doreen, arrives late, leaves hurriedly and when confronted by Carter is reluctant to speak.  Jack begins his enquiries.  And this film, in its curious way becomes a detective film, perhaps a dark satire on the English murder mystery, with Jack as amateur sleuth.  He re-enters the dark pit of local organised crime, and then suddenly the film reaches a hinge moment (which, I believe Hodges saw as a 'political' epiphany) and it becomes a revenge movie as Carter, as a destroying angel, goes on a very public campaign of retribution, wreaking havoc upon his enemies.  Though, it has to be said, he seems to be the least qualified person, morally, to do so. 

     The cast is superlative: Michael Caine, as the eponymous Carter, Brit Ekland, John Osbourne, Geraldine Moffat, Ian Hendry, and Kika Markham.  Director Mike Hodges (at his best), Producer Michael Klinger.  Excellent cinematography by Wolfgang Suschitsky, who worked in the British Documentary Movement, and brings an element of reportage to the proceedings.  And then there is score by Roy Budd.  I've heard it said that 'Get Carter' was the the last hurrah of the British arm of MGM.  There a sense that those involved what things to go out with a bang.  And they certainly did.

     Hodges also wrote the screenplay.  It is an adaptation of Ted Lewis's 1970 novel 'Jack's Return Home'.  (Klinger presented it to Hodges in Jan of that year, I believe a month or so before the book was published.)  Ted Lewis (1940-1982) had set the novel in north Lincolnshire where he grew up, in particular in the steel making town of Scunthorpe.  Hodges changed the location to Newcastle upon Tyne.

     I think there may be something in the choice of Newcastle over the less visually exciting Scunthorpe.  The city Hodges chooses to  depict is a wreck, decaying and corrupt.  Filthy and shoddy.  A place of turpitude. There is little glamour and that there is is connected to criminality.  Perhaps some subtle moralising.  The background to this is the then scandal of T Dan Smith, leader of Newcastle city council 1958-65.  A charismatic individual, and a man with fingers in many pies.  The sort of man, who to quote, yet again, the novelist Frank Herbert, 'ought to come with a warning label on the forehead: "May be dangerous to your health."  He was arrested in January 1970 and charged with 'receiving payments to influence local government contracts'.  He was tried in July 1971 and found not guilty.  In 1974 was brought to trial again, and that time pleaded guilty to corruption.  Smith was sentenced to 6 years at Her Majesty's pleasure.

     Hodges indeed saw this film in terms of 'the state of the nation', and he came came to see corruption beneath everything. In a 2016 interview with Adam Scovell he even sounded somewhat like Mary Whitehouse.  I'm stuck thinking that nothing quite fits, that there is something of a gap between Hodges intentions/rhetoric and the finished piece, good as it.  I am put in mind of work of Kurosawa who, for all his talk of being a pacifist, choreographed violence so beautifully.

Get Garter

1971

Producer:               Michael Klinger

Director:                 Mike Hodges

Cinematographer: Wolfgang Suschitsky