Celebrating the Best of British - Get Carter

Click poster for trailer

The British gangster film is all par for the course in the British film industry; it doesn't seem a year goes by without at least one film in the offing. Ever since Guy Ritchie's 'mockney' lovable rouges gallery film, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels the rate has increased and we've been inundated with some real shockers of piss-poor quality ever since. I find it astonishing that with our rich history in this genre that 'up and coming' directors look to Guy Ritchie's output rather than say Brighton Rock (John Boulting, 1947), The Long Good Friday (John Mackenzie, 1980) or Mike Hodges seminal and classic directorial debut 'Get Carter' (1971).


I can clearly remember the first time I watched Get Carter, in a grotty (and as it turned out rather apt) little cinema down an alley in Cambridge. Like most my peers I was a Michael Caine fanatic in the late 90's; 'Cool Britannia' was sweeping the country, we had new music, a new government and after many years of being ashamed of ourselves it finally become 'OK' to like being British again. So we looked back to a more retro, swinging age when we last 'liked' ourselves and the likes of Caine become something of an icon to the mass of young (mostly male) cine-fans. Get Carter however was nothing like the crime caper The Italian Job, it had none of the bravado and pompt of Zulu and for all the roguish and sexist behaviour of Alfie, Jack Carter makes him look like a saint in retrospect.


Jack Carter, a London underworld gangster of some reputation, boards a train to his old 'stomping ground' Newcastle, a dingy industrialist city on it's last legs, to find the truth behind his brothers death. As soon as you glimpse Carter in that first scene; amongst a group of mobsters, with their molls, sitting around a projector watching some dubious amateur porn and drinking whiskey, you can tell that Jack has only blood on his mind. In getting to the truth of his brothers death, Carter delves deep in to a world of porn, prostitution, the mundane existence of everyday violence and drugs; events spiral out of control as the audience follows Carter on his path of destruction, neither showing joy or grief along the way; as if it's something he was born to do with frightening ease.


It's Caine's portrayal of Carter at relative ease in this nihilistic society that fuels the film, surrounded as he is in abject depravity and moral ambiguity; playing out in noir formula as the body count rises, the violence escalates and shows no signs of abating. Littered with cheap looking crooks, petty criminals and want to be gangsters; even going as far as using locations that were made infamous some years before in gang land killings, Get Carter plays it for real; these aren't the lovable rouges or impish lads that modern audiences are subjected to, these people are the real deal; morally bankrupt and opportunistic.

"You're a big man but you're in bad shape" - classic, often quoted line from Get Carter

Hodges never made a film like this ever again; a case of difficult second album syndrome if ever there was one, made all the more puzzling when you consider the flair and wonderful touches on display throughout Get Carter. His shots of smoky booze filled working man clubs, back yards, cobbled streets, betting shops, the smog filled city effortlessly capture 1971 Newcastle and working class culture; you can almost smell the nicotine walls, smog and rain. He caught Caine at his most menacing, somehow capturing the darkness beneath the cheeky chap, cad persona audiences were used to. He also painted an all too grim yet real portrayal of everyday criminality in a society falling apart at the seams; as one world (the factories and mines were starting to close) comes to an end another world rises to take advantage of it's desperate people.



Get Carter has become part of the British film industry landscape; as recently being voted #16 in the greatest British Film's of all time by The BFI (British Film Institute). Some of it's film locations are now part of a tour of Newcastle, Caine has rarely matched the calculated fierceness of Jack Carter and Hodges dug himself a hole and held on to the coat tails of this film for as long as he could. Gathering something of a cult following initially, Get Carter is now seen as as a respected critically acclaimed film whose reputation grows with each passing year. From it's iconic soundtrack to it's inspirational opening scene (I can feel a sub-post coming on), Get Carter is a smooth but unremitting film, one that does divide audiences but never the less engages everyone that watches it.

P.S - If you decide to rent it out, please make sure you don't pick up this one by mistake. Everyone involved should be extremely ashamed of themselves.