Written and directed by Mike Hodges, based on a book by Ted Lewis, Get Carter is a cool and gritty gangster movie that features arguably the most iconic performance of Michael Caine’s career, couched in a film that easily jostles for a top spot when discussing landmarks of British cinema.
Caine plays Jack Carter, a London gangster who heads up to Newcastle to investigate the sudden death of his brother. There are a number of people who don’t want him poking around in their business, including the menacing Eric (Ian Hendry), but that just makes Carter more determined to find out the truth about the death of his brother. His instincts are right, but more people start to try and send him back to London, at the very least, as he gets ever closer to something very unpleasant. There seems to be a reckoning on the way, but who will be left at the end of it?
Get Carter is one of those films that always impresses, however many times you watch it. If you have never seen it, please do so immediately. If you haven’t watched it in a while, please treat yourself to a revisit. It is just one of those classics that has everything mixed together perfectly in a way you could never replicate nowadays (just ask Sylvester Stallone, although I am sneerily dismissing his remake without having actually seen it yet). The atmosphere, the landscape of Newcastle at that time (dominating the narrative as much as any of the main characters), Caine being cool and ruthless, the supporting players, the Roy Budd score, every technical aspect, and the script and direction from Hodges. This is a perfect film, and even the scenes that aren’t necessarily needed to push the story along provide moments and images worthy of your time.
It’s also worth noting, although I am not entirely sure how to put this, that Get Carter wins a prize for being the most sustained selection of unsexiest sexy exchanges, whether it is a naughty phone conversation that creates a triangle of Caine, Britt Ekland, and Rosemarie Dunham, the aftershock of an encounter between Caine and Geraldine Moffat, or even the oft-depicted image of Caine striding nakedly out of a house while he keeps a shotgun pointed at some ill-prepared henchmen. Everything has a frisson to it, but also a layer of grime and nastiness, and it adds to an overall sense of the film being very much a one-off.
Saying Caine is great in the lead role is like saying water is wet. It’s a given. This IS the role he feels born to play. Which is unlucky for Hendry, who was also in the running for the lead, but makes the bitterness between them all the more palpable. The aforementioned Dunham is excellent, Ekland and Moffat bring a touch of glamour to the whole thing, no matter how fleeting their screentime, and there are excellent performances from Alun Armstrong, Bryan Mosley, and John Osborne, to name just a few standouts.
This and The Long Good Friday remain the peak of British crime movies. They have moments that are cool, that are incredibly cinematic and memorable, but they also focus on the cruelty, showing how the main characters are shaped as much by the events and people around them as they are by their self-created position of power. These are the films that everyone should watch, that entertain even as they look at the morality of things from all angles. And it’s why many film fans become upset when something like Rise Of The Footsoldier 7: Footsoldiers Go Footballing In Ibiza becomes the latest British crime film that casual viewers rate as a great night in. I implore you not to check out any of those films until you have seen this.
10/10
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