British Gangsters: Get Carter (Dir Mike Hodges, 1h47m, 1971)

There is British crime film before Get Carter, and there is British crime film after it. Few films in the genre in the subsequent half-century plus have managed to step out of the long shadow cast by Jack Carter (Michael Caine) in Mike Hodges' gritty Newcastle-set revenge thriller, a return to the gangster as hard-bitten, violent, and dangerous threat after the sanitation of the 1960s had turned the gangster soft in the very decade the real-life thing, in the form of the Kray Twins and associated faces terrorised, extorted and controlled vice in Swinging London and beyond. It is through the lens of Get Carter that the gangster comes back into focus.

At the centre of Get Carter's success is Caine and Hodges; by 1971, Michael Caine was not only one of the biggest British stars of the decade, but undeniably one of its coolest, and most influential: look no further than Caine in The Ipcress File, his first appearance as the anti-heroic spy, Harry Palmer, to see a ready-made style icon: the hornrimmed glasses, the sharp suits, paired with a stylish and decidedly anti-heroic wit. Caine's cockney accent would also play a part, as the womanising Alfie (1966, his first nomination for an Oscar), and as the charming crook, Charlie Croker in The Italian Job (1969). Against him, Mike Hodges' work amounted to the mystery drama, The Tyrant King (1968), and the television film, Rumour (1969), in which Michael Cole's journalist finds himself out of his depth after following a story of corruption to its source.

Yet, the worlds of real-life, and cinematic, gangsters were about to intercede; the trial, and subsequent life imprisonment of the Kray twins, their celebrity status, and a general interest in the British criminal underworld began to coalesce; producer Michael Klinger, approached by a floundering British arm of MGM Studios, decided to capitalise on this trend, picking Hodges, already known to him through Rumour to adapt the novel Jack's Return Home by Ted Lewis. Hodges would be paid just £7,000 (the film's budget remains disputed, but around $/£750,000), although this came too late to rescue MGM-British Studios from closing. Relocating the film's tale of revenge in Carter's home town to Newcastle, and striping any trace of sentimentality from Carter's backstory, Hodges would also take influence from B-Movies and noirs such as the work of Raymond Chandler (Carter is reading Chandler's Farewell my Lovely in the film's opening credits), such that Get Carter, to a degree, considered, in Hodges own words, "how to use the crime story as an autopsy on society's ills".

Jack Carter (Michael Caine) stalks the streets of Newcastle

London. A backroom. We meet Harry Carter in the aftermath of his brother's death, allegedly driving drunk; we also meet his employers, East End gangsters, the Fletchers (John Bindon-rumoured to be associated with the Krays himself, and Terence Rigby), the tableaux of Carter's introduction underpinning the film's depiction of gangsters, the duo flicking through slides of pornography in a seedy backroom; as Caine himself, whose role in developing the film has often been underappreciated, notes: "in English movies, gangsters were either stupid or funny. I wanted to show that they’re neither". Far from desperate men or ultimately "good fellas", The Fletchers are a thinly fictionalised, deeply unpleasant, and utterly unromantic depiction of vicious, ruthless, and powerful men. In one scene, the romanticised view of the gangster in British cinema lies in tatters.

Undisuaded, Carter heads north: in perhaps the only truly cinematically cool moment in a film otherwise unsentimental and unimpressed by the "style" of the gangster, this journey is soundtracked by Roy Budd's jazz inflected score-this too will only appear sparsely; this is no longer a film in which gangsters have this veneer of coolness, of respectability. Nothing will change when Jack reaches the industrialised North. Save for playwright and former actor and Angry Young Man, John Osborne's mannered take on Jack's nemesis, Kinnear, whose performance ultimately reveals more of the same bastardry, Newcastle's criminal underworld are just as morally decayed and nasty as their southern counterparts; the city around them is equally derelict, a timecapsule of the rapidly deindustrialising North in the early 1970s, from Kinnear downwards.

Thus the film introduces us to his underlings, and the other denizens of the Newcastle criminal underworld, from his driver, and former associate of Carter, Eric Paice (Ian Hendry, whose alcoholism would require the film to work around the actor in several scenes-Hendry's animosity to Caine fuels several of their scenes) and another former Carter associate, Albert, (Albert Swift), whose seediness and connections to the fate of Carter's brother make him a prime target for the London gangster, even before his full role in it is revealed. Against these forces of the old Newcastle, the decaying city of vice and corruption, the film places property developer Cliff Brumby (Bryan Mosley), introduced in a masterfully shot one-shot sequence, at the top of the towering form of a multi-story carpark, where he plans to build a cafe. His are the acceptable vices, principally gambling, but he too is just as much part of the downfall of Carter's brother as the less respectable figures in the city.

Caine and Mike Hodges (right) on the set of Get Carter

It is Carter himself that most starkly depicts how Get Carter differs from its predecessors; Jack Carter is not the troubled protagonist of the noir, nor the identifiable hero of the late 1950s and 1960s, forced to turn to crime to make ends meet. Jack Carter is a cold-blooded gangster heading north not by necessity, but pure bloody revenge. He is, unapologetically, a violent and dangerous figure, bristling with scarcely concealed hatred towards the men he holds responsible for his brother's death and for the events leading to it.

He is neither pleasant company nor a stylish antihero, and the film shows him meting out brutal punishment, shown in the scene when hunting down the unfortunate messenger of one of the gangs through a discotheque, finally cornering him in a public toilet, and later, when Carter arrives at a friend's bedside when his house is attacked in return to be cursed and sworn at for his lack of empathy for those caught in the crossfire. This, and in the stark shootout at the dock between Carter and representatives of the Fletchers lays bare Carter's brutality, action scenes that are neither glamorous nor cool, but simply effective and short, the very mechanics of a gangster movie stripped to the bones beneath.

What is starkest though, about this urbane thuggery, the actions of Carter, is how often they involve women; this is a film of its time. Carter is a womaniser, planning to run away with Britt Ekland's gangster's moll-the girlfriend of Carter's superiors, seduces his landlady (Rosemarie Dunham) and Brumby's messenger and hanger-on (Geraldine Moffat) For all his brutality, there is a certain magnetism to him, a deathly-dry wit-this is the most notable break from the films we have considered so far, where women are either innocent bystanders or, occasionally, femme fatales, but never the focus of the violence of the gangster film. Here, things are different, the realism of Get Carter most notable in how Carter deals with the men and women involved in his brother's death, his revenge just as unflinching regardless of whom he is dealing with, to some truly grim denouements.

Yet, Carter is far more complex than the misogynistic anti-heroes that would follow in his wake-for example, Charles Bronson's Kersey in Death Wish (1974), with much of his revenge driven by the need to protect his niece as much as avenge his brother, its grit as much a part of its setting as its protagonist, a film that dismantles the glamour of the gangster, to rebuild it as a far starker of real life criminals of the period, and the declining indutstrial North of England. Now, over fifty years since its release, Get Carter's imitators are innumerable, both in tone and subject, a veritable army of "hard men", but few, if any, compare to Jack Carter; Get Carter is nothing short of a reset on the cinematic gangster, and among the greatest British films ever made.

Rating: Must See (Personal Recommendation)

Get Carter is available on DVD and Bluray from the BFI. It is available for streaming on Apple TV

Next week, our final outing with the Gangster film, as we arrive in 1980s London with Bob Hoskins' Harold Shand in The Long Good Friday.