A crime film which follows a steel-hard guy, Carter, as he heads north to the bleak, ghost-town locales of Newcastle for his brother’s funeral. After meeting up with his brother’s daughter, he begins to believe that his brother’s death was not an accident. Along the way he has a fling and slams into a viper’s nest of pornographers and thugs, lorded over by a venomous, shady-type named Kinnear.
British writer-director Mike Hodges honed his craft in television before segueing to the big screen with the gangster melodrama Get Carter (1971), starring Michael Caine as a cold-blooded hit man. Dismissed by critics as overly violent at its initial release, the film has come to be regarded as a minor masterpiece and an influence on such disparate movie directors as John Woo, Quentin Tarantino and Guy Ritchie.
Born in Bristol, Hodges originally trained as an accountant but after a requisite stint in the Royal Navy found employment as a teleprompter writer. Exposed to the workings of television, Hodges tried his hand and crafting scripts and sold one. He made the transition to director and producer overseeing segments of the English newsmagazine World of Action in the early 1960s. A stint on the arts-themed Tempo followed, where he prepared profiles of such notable film personalities as Jean-Luc Godard and Orson Welles. Further honing his craft, Hodges… read more
an early entry in the 70's-tough-guy-nihilism sub-genre, noteworthy for some inventive atmosphere and an unusually miserable narrative. beyond that, this isn't categorically different from all the 80's crapola that followed once you look past the new-wavy editing. at the end of the day, it's another hateful authoritarian fantasy - with just enough arthouse gravy to dupe you into thinking it's profound. disappointing.
Michael Caine is great in this as a cold but cool hitman out to seek revenge for his deceased brother. Very violent. The film might be a little too cold for its own good but its worth seeing for Caine's performance and as an artifact of the kind of violence they got away with in the 70's.
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"The day started quietly enough. Then I got out of bed. That was my first mistake." Mike Hodges' 1972 caper Pulp, his follow-up to the iconic
"All the same, there was something going on which remains true, even when the words and pictures are mostly made up." In 1990, playwright
Get Carter, a personal favourite, is one of the purest and most raw crime films ever made, along with Boorman’s “Point Blank”, Melville’s “le Samourai”, Friedkin’s “French Connection”, and Peckinpah’s… read review