Get Carter [1971] [DVD]

Among English movies, 1971's "Get Carter" is always cited as near the top noir/gangster/crime movies ever made. It was based on Ted Lewis's ferocious book Jack's Return Home, which I understand was based on a true crime; was adapted for the screen and directed by the British Mike Hodges, who's got a gift for this kind of thing. The British best people the cast: Michael Caine in his prime, as Carter; backed by Terence Rigby, George Sewell, Bernard Hepton, Alun Armstrong, and Ian Hendry. Britt Ekland (Mrs. Peter Sellers to you) played the love interest. And well-known English playwright John Osborne plays Kinnear, an important supporting role.

The movie opens as Carter, enforcer/hit man for a London mob, who's carrying on with his boss's girlfriend (Ekland) learns his brother has died back home in Newcastle in circumstances Carter deems suspicious. Against the wishes of his boss (Rigby), he decides to head north to investigate. He travels upcountry on a very smoky train reading the American hard-boiled author Raymond Chandler's "Farewell My Lovely" as he goes. Once home, nothing and no one will dissuade him from finding the truth -- fast and furiously -- and then taking a very bloody revenge on all concerned.

"Get Carter" packs a lot in its less than two-hour length. It preserves, more accurately than any other movie known to me, a snapshot of the sour swinging England of the 70's. And it makes inspired use of the aging industrial city Newcastle. The rusted chimneys against the sky, the graffiti, the miles of streets lined with traditional 2-up, 2-down cottages, the tear-down-candidate pubs and betting parlors with primitive toilets out back. Add the constant overcast sky/rain; the grey menacing northern sea. The little touches are also important: a knitted purple tea cosy, and a chamber pot under the bed at the boarding house where Carter stays. The clumsy provincial kids at a dance hall. And then there's the just right jazz score.

But it's Caine's movie, of course, and the theory goes that gangster pictures depend totally on the power and energy of their stars: consider James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, George Raft. Caine almost shoots sparks as a sexual predator in his phone sex scene: he achieves a double seduction; Ekland on the phone, his landlady in the room with him. His feral smile at a pub cat fight, and at the end of the picture, as he moves to avenge his brother's death, is bone-chilling. Yet he's able to cry at an important-to-the-plot porn movie.

As an actor, Caine, who was born a London cockney, has played gangsters as coldly menacing as they come, and maybe we're lucky he's strictly an actor. One of the smaller gangster roles here, Sid Fletcher, is played by a man called John Bindon, who was, in fact, a London gangster. British director Ken Loach first used Bindon to play a London villain in his now little-seen Poor Cow [DVD] [1967](1967). Bindon went on to work in a number of movies and TV shows, always playing a villain, until he decided working as the real thing paid better. After Bindon took part in a bloody Soho shootout, not even his British duchess girlfriend could save him. He died as a guest of Her Majesty: of AIDS in a none-too lovely jail cell. But Sir Michael Caine is still very much with us, no longer a pretty boy, to be sure; but he still adds something to every picture he makes.

This is a very poor quality DVD for what is widely considered to be one of the greatest British films ever made.
The picture is grainy and has dust marks all over it and the sound is muffled and distorted. I own a CD of the soundtrack (featuring both the music and clips of dialogue) and the sound crystal clear so why they couldn't make a stereo or surround sound mix is beyond me. Obviously no attempt has been made to restore it; it his just been transferred to a disc in the cheapest way possible. Special features are also non-existent, apart for a pretty good commentary track.
When compared to other classic film releases this is very poor indeed.

GET CARTER is probably Mike Hodges' masterpiece. It is certainly Britain's gangster-film masterpiece ... complete with unacceptable-in-America ending. THE LONG GOOD FRIDAY and LOCK, STOCK & TWO SMOKING BARRELS may arguably come close to emulating GET CARTER's success and cult status, but do not equal it. Cinematographer Wolfgang Suschitzky could have shot the film in black & white with no discernable change of mood or visual nuances: it is set amidst the bleak, industrial decay of early-70s Newcastle-upon-Tyne. The closing slag-heap scenes are in daylight, but the overcast, lowering sky drowns out all colour. Even the signature-tune is plaintively minimalist.

The plot features nasty villains, principal among whom is 'the hero,' surly London gangland racketeer and troubleshooter Jack Carter (Michael Caine at his most impassively impressive, in perhaps his best-ever rôle) who is only slightly more self-righteous than the Geordie 'rural Mafia' he out-villains whilst unravelling the complex web of cover-ups, bribes, double-crosses and sudden violence to determine which villain(s) in particular he will wreak 'orrific vengeance upon for A] them wot done 'is bruvver in, and also later on B] for involving his niece in a blue-film racket. On the train 'oop north' Carter reads Raymond Chandler's FAREWELL, MY LOVELY, but he lacks entirely any of Philip Marlowe's scruples and morals. Carter screws the bird but doesn't bat an eyelid when the car - with her in the boot - is pushed into the river, nor does he flinch a facial muscle when discovering that his sole ally (Alun Armstrong) has been brutally given the once-over.

Today's porn industry enjoys a semi-glossy veneer of stylishness with most of the porn 'stars' being in control of their careers, but back in the heady days of the early-1970s 'blue movies' were exploitationist, gritty, sleazy and dirty, complete with poor-quality film and the absence of sound. GET CARTER's ending is unexpected (the only similarly-unexpected ending I can think of is Sergio Corbucci's IL GRANDE SILENZIO [1969]), and yet fitting for the film's ongoing theme of bleakness and pessimism. Including the final fade-out.

The film features neat cameos by Ian Hendry (as Eric Paice, the scheming chauffeur with the I-am-a-baddy shades) and noted playwright John Osborne (as the menacing Cyril Kinnear). Memorable is Carter's somewhat unpleasant 'seduction-to-telephone' of moll Britt Ekland back in London whilst observing his Newcastle landlady rocking in her chair barely containing her surging hormones ... until Ekland's oafish 'owner' enters the room and cannot imagine what she is doing unclad, "You got gut-ache or something ...?"

Steven Soderbergh's "requiem for the hard man" THE LIMEY (1999) may look like a 1990s version of GET CARTER: just released from Her Majesty's pleasure, well-'ard Terence Stamp goes out to Los Angeles to find out why and by who's hand his daughter was done-in. The Chandleresque dialogue includes a high London slang content and Stamp knocks the opposition about with machine-gun resonance, but there the similarities end ...

Hollywood made a 'GET CARTER 2000' ... HOW DARE THEY ...!!!