“Get Carter”: A Re-examination

If English writer Derek Raymond exercises an influence in death that’s disproportionate to that which he achieved in life (and I believe he does), then his cinematic counterpoint is certainly director Mike Hodges’ 1971 production of Get Carter, based on the obscure novel Jack’s Return Home, by Ted Lewis.

This film, in fact, was lost to the British public for many years, only resurfacing when--much to Hodges’ chagrin--the magazine Loaded adopted it as the epitome of mid-1990s lads culture. It’s a reading of the film that is either entirely insensible or willfully incorrect. Because Get Carter is a purposefully sour vision of Britain at the dawn of the ’70s, providing as desolate a perspective on the country as post-punk would offer towards that decade’s conclusion.

The narrative itself concerns mobster Jack Carter (Michael Caine), a native of Newcastle, now living in London and working for a local “firm.” As the film opens, we see Carter pour himself a drink, clearly bored with the pornographic movie his bosses are watching. It’s an important beat; we see that Carter is a nowhere man. He’s not with these men, not really; but he’s not apart from them, either. As he sits back down, the camera voyeuristically slides over the supple curves of Anna (Britt Ekland) and we sense the implication: they’re conducting an affair. Momentarily distracted from his porn, Carter’s boss asks Jack not to return home, to let the police handle “it” (the supposed car-crash death of his elder brother, Frank), and we gather that these two are at cross-purposes.

It’s a strong scene, precisely because Hodges imparts so much information through so little effort; it feels naturalistic despite its density. As such, it sends a message to the audience: this is a film you either pay close attention to, or you’ll be left behind. And then we see Carter on board a train, bringing pain, both physical and personal, to everyone involved in the unfolding tragedy. The score, a key part of Get Carter’s artistic success, warrants a mention here. British jazz man Roy Budd brings a propulsive funk to the film that heightens the already intensifying sense of storm clouds gathering.

Carter’s return to Newcastle is ostensibly to attend his estranged brother’s funeral, although it’s not until we visit the family home that we realize this. In a grubby house, with chunks of wallpaper missing from the walls, we find the corpse of Frank Carter. It’s there that one of the core themes of the film is introduced: decline. This house had once been a comfortable abode, where Frank lived with his wife and Doreen (Petra Markham), his daughter. But nobody’s paid attention to the décor in years and, certainly, nobody lives there. Finding it hard to credit his sibling’s passing to accidental circumstances, Carter begins to question the people in his brother’s life: Frank’s daughter, his mistress, his workmates. This exercise, coupled with the fact that Jack Carter was reading a Raymond Chandler paperback novel on the train north, informs us that far from being classified as a gangster film, which it often is, Get Carter can be viewed as a British private eye movie. And, as is commonly true of works in that genre, Get Carter is less about the case and more about the nature of the man working it.

The gangster elements of this 38-year-old film are, in point of fact, fairly conventional: the London firm that employs Carter has interests in Newcastle, and there’s a war brewing between the Newcastle firms, both of which become increasingly nervous about Carter’s presence in their city and try to recruit him through both obvious and covert means. The question of whether brother Frank was involved with those local gangsters, and to what extent they were responsible for his death, is, of course, one of the things driving Carter. As a piece of narrative, this tale is not dissimilar from Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest (1929). Unlike Hammett’s novel, however, there are innocents in Get Carter’s world, and the film is careful to take note of when they’re injured--such as when Keith, a local barman who is slightly in awe of Carter, is left to take a beating meant for the visiting gangster. It’s this attitude towards violence, that you simply need to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, that really marries the worldviews of Ted Lewis and Derek Raymond and, therefore, positions this film as the cinematic equivalent of one of Raymond’s “black novels.”

Another key theme of the film is escape. This is brought to particular prominence when Carter interrogates Margaret (Dorothy White), his brother’s mistress, on the swing bridge. He explains to her that he’s only returned to this “crap house” to find out what became of his brother, and the viewer is forced to consider that this is a man who fled Newcastle for London only to become a lieutenant in a firm. But he might have taken the same dangerous path had he remained, and now he and Anna are planning to escape to South America: he’s a man who’s never stopped running. “We are what we are, like it or not,” Margaret says. If we didn’t recognize it before, we see it now: Carter has been quietly imploding for some time.

Such hints about Jack Carter unraveling are confirmed in the next major scene, during which we join him and a local gang boss’ “moll,” Glenda (Geraldine Moffat), as they make love under a coverless duvet, our eyes drawn to the mirror at the head of the bed in which their reflections can be seen, intentionally recalling the voyeurism of the pornographic movie running at the start of the film. When Glenda excuses herself from the bedroom, Carter gets up to turn on another projector. In a cinematic tour de force, the camera settles on Caine’s face and we are allowed to observe the action of that film he’s viewing both in the reaction of his features and the reflection of the mirror behind him. It’s another pornographic picture. Only this one, to the horror of the audience as well as Carter, does not feature some anonymous young woman; instead, it stars Doreen, his niece (who, it’s suggested, is actually his daughter). Having a personal connection to the subject matter, Carter can no longer marshal the professional detachment of the P.I. First he crumbles and then, with discernible effort, he exerts control.

As with all noir protagonists, Jack Carter is ultimately doomed. This is grimly and obviously played out across the last third of the film as the audience finds Carter, once an individual informed by his self-imposed control, being informed instead by his directed anger. The film ends with the now feral Carter, who had become a liability to the criminal institution he serves, being executed upon a beach. As nihilistic an ending as could be imagined.

Unlike the majority of crime cinema works, Get Carter isn’t a celebration of flawed masculinity or triumphant individualism. It’s an interrogation of lives at the margins of human society, margins populated by the increasingly desperate. (It’s significant that director Hodges has a background as a reporter for the old British investigative program World in Action.) The world of Get Carter is one where people simply prey upon one another and in so doing render whatever victories they may achieve pyrrhic.

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Here’s the theatrical trailer to Get Carter, which has been hailed by film critics as the greatest British movie of all time:



And let us add a little bit of news, excerpted from the Comments section of this post. The writer is Maxim Jakubowski, celebrated British editor and former bookstore owner:

You might all be interested to learn that Mike Hodges, who is a good friend, has recently written his first novel. “Watching the Wheels Come Off” is a noir comedy about a day in the life of [a] failed con man when everything goes from bad to worse. It has just appeared in France from Rivages and the English-language edition will appear in March of next year in the UK from my new list, Maximum Crime, from John Blake Publishing.

We’ll undoubtedly have more to say about this later.

READ MORE: “A Conversation with Writer/Director Mike Hodges,” by Maxim Jakubowski (Mulholland Books); “Ted Lewis: Noir Maverick,” by Brian Greene (Criminal Element).