Films to Watch if You Like Get Carter

One of the most iconic titles in British screen history turns 50 in March 2021. There's no questioning the impact made by Mike Hodges's Get Carter (1971), as it changed the way in which crime was depicted on both film and television. But what should you look out for while watching it and what should you see next if you liked it? That's where CinemaParadiso.co.uk comes in...

The funny thing about the double-barrelled shotgun that a naked Jack Carter brandishes at the London thugs who have pursued him to Newcastle is that it never gets fired. But Get Carter is the smoking gun of 1970s British cinema. The crime genre had witnessed incidents of shocking violence in such pictures as John Boulting's Brighton Rock (1947) and St John Legh Clowes's No Orchids For Miss Blandish (1948). Yet British gangster movies had never had the raw edge of their American counterparts and Ealing comedies like Charles Crichton's The Lavender Hill Mob (1951) and Alexander Mackendrick's The Ladykillers (1955) had parodied them to such perfection that any sense of menace had dissipated.

In his debut feature, however, Mike Hodges restored the danger while also adding the working-class attitude that had made the 'angry young men' of the previous decade's kitchen sink sagas so potently unsettling. The Swinging Sixties separate Carter from Jimmy Porter and Joe Lampton. But he's still got a chip on the shoulder of his well-cut suit and this enables Hodges to bring a new social realism and a moral and spiritual intensity to gangland in order to reclaim it from the likes of Charlie Croker, who had spent the 60s carrying on in comic capers. In many ways, Cliff Brumby is the personification of the British crime film and Carter is spot on in telling him, 'You're a big man. But you're out of shape.' His wake-up call would be heard by the likes of Quentin Tarantino and Guy Ritchie.

The Geordie Yojimbo

In 1967, the discovery of the bullet-riddled body of Angus Sibbet in his car under Pesspool Bridge in South Hetton barely made headlines outside the North-East of England. There were few national headlines when Dennis Stafford and Michael Luvaglio were convicted of the so-called 'one-armed bandit murder', which earned its nickname because Luvaglio's brother, Vince Landa, ran the Sunderland-based fruit-machine company, Social Club Services. Both men charged maintained their innocence after being released on life licences after serving 12 years. Indeed, Stafford - who was born two months and two streets away from Ronnie and Reggie Kray - hopes that a proposed film of his 2007 tome, Fun-Loving Criminal: The Autobiography of a Gentleman Gangster, will finally help clear his name.

His cause hasn't been helped, however, by the fact that Ted Lewis drew on the case for his 1970 novel, Jack's Return Home, which provided the inspiration for one of the grittiest films made in Britain to that point. Producer Michael Klinger was quick to option the manuscript, which owed enough to the American hard-boiled style for director Mike Hodges to have Jack Carter read a Raymond Chandler thriller on the train from London to Newcastle. Edward Dmytryk and Dick Richards's respective adaptations, Murder, My Sweet (1945) and Farewell, My Lovely (1974), are available to rent on high-quality disc from Cinema Paradiso.

Having followed the trial of the Kray twins and seen Peter Walker's Man of Violence (1969), Klinger was determined to make a gangster flick that would reinvent the genre for UK audiences. He got his chance when MGM offered him space at Borehamwood Studios, which the Hollywood company was in the process of closing down, and a budget of £462,000. It wasn't much, even by 1970s, standards, but Klinger was convinced that he had found a director who could work on such restricted means and for a flat fee of £7000.

Mike Hodges had gone into television after serving on a Royal Navy minesweeper ('I'd seen a lot of dead bodies.'). Although he had worked on such factual programmes as World in Action (1963-98), he had also moved into drama and two of the teleplays that had so impressed Klinger - Suspect (1969) and Rumour (1970) - can be found on the Armchair Cinema Collection, which also contains Jack Gold's 'The Sailor's Return' (1978) and 'Charlie Muffin' (1979). They don't make 'em like this anymore!

Fron the outset, Hodges wanted Carter's the Name (as the project was initially called) to break free from the caperishness that had characterised Peter Collinson's The Italian Job (1969) and took his cues in reworking the Lewis text from Robert Aldrich's sombrely noirsh adaptation of Mickey Spillane's Kiss Me Deadly (1955). By having Carter sew discord between the rival factions, however, Hodges turns his anti-hero into a Geordie variation on Toshiro Mifune's character in Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo (1961), which was remade as A Fistful of Dollars (1964) by Sergio Leone, with Clint Eastwood as the taciturn stranger.

However, Hodges dispensed with the flashbacks to Carter's Tyneside youth to show why he was so intent on avenging the death of his brother, Frank, who had perished in a car crash after being plied with drink. Furthermore, in sticking to the events around the funeral, Hodges removes some of the rationale for Carter's disappointment with old pal Albert Swift and his loathing of Eric Paice, who had brutalised Carter's lover during his time in London. Most importantly of all, Hodges ditched the idea of Carter being some sort of avenging angel of the north by questioning his sense of moral superiority over the people he was slaying with such dispassionate efficiency.

The Ghost of Maurice Micklewhite

Having worked with Klinger on Roman Polanski's Repulsion (1965), Ian Hendry had high hopes of landing the title role in their reunion. Hodges also thought highly of him and wrote the script with him in mind. But he was also concerned that Hendry was in poor shape because of his alcoholism. Moreover, MGM wanted a star name to boost sales Stateside and, consequently, Hendry was shunted into the role of Paice and Michael Caine was afforded an opportunity to ditch the charm he had exhibited in Lewis Gilbert's Alfie (1966) and the sang froid he had shown as Harry Palmer in the Len Deighton trio of The Ipcress File (Sidney J. Furie, 1965), Funeral in Berlin (Guy Hamilton, 1966) and Billion Dollar Brain, 1967).

More to the point, Caine seemed to feel he had a misconception to put right after The Italian Job. 'One of the reasons I wanted to make that picture,' he later explained, 'was my background. In English movies, gangsters were either stupid or funny. I wanted to show that they're neither. Gangsters are not stupid, and they're certainly not very funny.' In drawing on memories of the underworld figures he had encountered while growing up around Elephant and Castle, Caine tweaked the screenplay to make Carter less genial, while also insisting that his violence was more clinical than cinematic. As a result, Carter became 'the dead-end product of my own environment, my childhood; I know him well. He is the ghost of Michael Caine.'

MGM suggested someone of the stature of Telly Savalas for one of the villainous roles. But Hodges stuck with homegrown talent and chose Bryan Mosley to play Cliff Brumby after being impressed with his heft in the fight sequences in John Schlesinger's adaptation of Thomas Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd (1967). Best known for playing grocer Alf Roberts in Coronation Street (1961-99), Mosley was a devout Catholic and asked his parish priest if it would be okay to play such a reprehensible individual.

Playwright John Osborne had no such qualms about taking the role of kingpin Cyril Kinnear, although he did have to learn how to play poker for the scene in which Carter breaks into his closely guarded lair. Given that Osborne had written such landmark social realist dramas as Look Back in Anger and The Entertainer (which had been brought to the screen by Tony Richardson in 1959 and 1960), this legitimised Hodges's attempt to root the gangster picture in an industrial northern setting. However, he did have problems recording the dialogue, as Osborne (whose career is celebrated in Tony Palmer's documentary, John Osborne and the Gift of Friendship, 2006) spoke so quietly that the microphone didn't always pick up what he was saying.

A familiar face from such TV shows as Z-Cars (1965-67) and Paul Temple (1969-71), George Sewell was cast as Con McCarty, who is sent north by London mobsters Sid and Gerald Fletcher (John Bindon and Terence Rigby). He is accompanied by Peter the Dutchman, who is played by Tony Beckley, who had essayed Camp Freddy opposite Caine in The Italian Job. Glynn Edwards (Albert Swift) had also worked with Caine on Cy Endfield's Zulu (1964) and production designer Assheton Gorton had some fun at the star's expense by placing some shields and assegais on the walls of Kinnear's hideout.

Stage and small-screen stalwart Bernard Hepton returned to cinema for the first since co-ordinating the fight scenes in Laurence Olivier's Richard III (1955). He steals scenes as the twitchy henchman, Thorpey, and is unrecognisable from the actor who had played Archbishop Thomas Cranmer in The Six Wives of Henry VIII (1970), Elizabeth R (1971) and Waris Husein's Henry VIII and His Six Wives (1972). Much more identifiable is Alun Armstrong who lucked out in writing to MGM for work just as Hodges was casting. He made his screen debut as Keith the barman and would return to his old stomping ground to play Austin Donohue in the BBC series, Our Friends in the North (1996), before becoming the fixture that was Brian Lane in New Tricks (2004-13).

Despite giving Caine as good as she gets as Edna the landlady, the splendid Rosemarie Dunham continued to crop up mostly in small roles in film and television prior to Hodges giving her a walk-on in Croupier (1998). By contrast, Geraldine Moffat quit acting in 1980 after her fine performance as Glenda, the moll whose bedside projector provides Carter with the evidence he needs to embark upon a killing spree. Margaret and Doreen, Glenda's co-stars in the seedy smoker, were played by Margaret White and Petra Markham, with the former being a dependable tele-actress who had worked with Hodges on Suspect and the latter going on to become a busy character actress who would spend time in Albert Square as Rose Chapman in EastEnders (1985-).

Had Klinger landed his preferred candidate for the role of Carter's lover Anna, Ralph Thomas's Quest For Love (1971) would have represented a reunion for Geraldine Moffat and Joan Collins. But she lost out to Britt Ekland, who was reluctant to play another gangster's moll after Stiletto and Machine Gun McCain (both 1969). However, she needed quick cash after her accountant had made some poor investment decisions following her divorce from Peter Sellers, with whom she had co-starred in Vittorio De Sica's After the Fox (1966) and Robert Parrish's The Bobo (1967), However, she was disappointed that her screen time was limited to Anna's phone sex session with Carter, as images of her mutilated face after Gerald catches her in flagrante were deemed too shocking for audiences in 1971.

Get Carter setting: Fog on the Tyne

As the source novel didn't specify Carter's home town, Hodges thought about Hull and the Humber estuary as an evocative setting. Keen to convey a sense of hardscrabble deprivation, he also looked at Grimsby, Lowestoft and North Shields before settling on Newcastle upon Tyne and Gateshead. Having previously provided the backdrop for Brian Desmond Hurst's On the Night of the Fire (1939), Ralph Thomas's The Clouded Yellow (1950) and Sidney Hayers's Payroll (1961), Tyneside came with the bonus of having its own criminal network that Hodges researched in depth in order to give the action added authenticity, right down to using Dryderdale Hall, which had recently been vacated by Vince Landa, for Kinnear's HQ.

A newspaper headline in the title sequence refers to the 'Gaming Wars' that made the property notorious. But it never acquired the cult status of the Trinity Square multi-storey car park in Gateshead, where Cliff Brumby was planning to open a restaurant. This was demolished in 2010 to make way for a shopping centre, complete with its own cinema. The staithes at Blyth Cambois seen during the climactic chase sequence were mostly lost to a fire in the 1980s, around the time that Blackhall Colliery was closed down. Known as 'The Flights', the conveyor towers used to dump coal into the North Sea were largely demolished in the early 2000s as part of a clean-up exercise known as 'Turning the Tide'. But Hodges and cinematographer Wolfgang Suschitzky made such atmospheric, indeed Antonioniesque use of them during the denouement that Blackhall Beach will forever remain iconic.

Despite a one-day strike by the Association of Cinematograph, Television and Allied Technicians during the first week, the shoot progressed without incident between 17 July and 15 September 1970. Hodges had to dissuade Klinger from adding a car chase in the style of Peter Yates's Bullitt (1968), but the producer largely kept out of the way. Indeed, the trickiest issue facing the director was Hendry's alcoholism and a grudge against Caine that made it difficult to rehearse. His physical state also meant that Hodges had to film the beach chase in reverse, so that Hendry still had enough puff to deliver his lines.

He was much better disposed towards Caine, who displayed no signs of stellar egotism in playing Carter as a tight-lipped man on a mission whose face gives next to nothing away. However, Caine did insist that Carter spoke with the London accent he had picked up since leaving Newcastle. Alun Armstrong acted as dialect coach during the shoot and the Bristolian Hodges later admitted to being surprised when he was told that few of the characters actually spoke with a Geordie brogue.

Reminiscent of Denys Coop's shots of Bradford in John Schlesinger's Billy Liar (1963), Suschitzky's views of a landscape in the throes of terminal industrial decline served to remind audiences just how little the seismic socio-cultural changes of the 1960s had actually impacted on ordinary folk outside Swinging London. The use of locals like pub singer Deana Wilde as extras also reinforced the sense that Women's Liberation was still a new concept in the North East. This level of social critique was entirely new to the British crime picture and Get Carter hits home hardest in concluding that the party was over and that the country finally had to deal with the class tensions that had been simmering since before the Great War. Given the role played by the so-called Red Wall in securing Brexit and a sizeable majority for Boris Johnson's Conservative government, however, it seems clear that the problems Hodges identified remain unsolved.

Now Behave Yourself

Speaking shortly after filming on location, Caine had lamented, 'I had never witnessed misery like this in my own country...It was like Charles Dickens meets Emily Brontë, written by Edgar Wallace.' Years later, however, his tone had changed. 'When I made Get Carter, I wanted to make it violent,' he told one interviewer. 'Actually, it looks like Mary Poppins now, but we made it very violent for the time.'

Apart from some shots of the knife during the attack on Albert Swift, the censor found little to which to object in awarding an X certificate. But, as had been the case with Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (1960), the majority of British critics were too busy bemoaning the levels of violence that would recur in two other 1971 releases, Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange and Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs, to recognise Get Carter's wider significance. Some accused Hodges of reinforcing criminous stereotypes, while others damned with faint praise, including jazz musician-cum-writer George Melly, who informed Observer readers that the film was 'like a bottle of neat gin swallowed before breakfast. It's intoxicating all right, but it'll do you no good.'

Besotted with John Schlesinger's Sunday Bloody Sunday, Joseph Losey's The Go-Between, Luchino Visconti's Death in Venice and Miloš Forman's Taking Off, industry insiders were no more alert to the film's quality, as its sole BAFTA nomination went to Ian Hendry for Best Supporting Actor. Composer Roy Budd could have felt particularly miffed at being overlooked, as his score is simply superb. But, just as MGM botched the award season ballyhoo, it also did a mediocre job of promoting a picture that had broken the mould and Hodges had to settle for finishing sixth on the end-of-year box-office chart.

With MGM facing a financial crisis, it ceded US distribution to United Artists, who had concerns that American audiences wouldn't be able to understand the Cockney twang in the opening scene. The dubbed version was scarcely an improvement and Get Carter wound up touring the drive-in circuit in tandem with Burt Kennedy's comic Frank Sinatra Western, Dirty Dingus Magee, although someone recognised the film's value, as it inspired George Armitage's blaxploitation saga, Hit Man (1972). In re-recording the dialogue for the US release, however, UA managed to misplace the original voice track and British television viewers had to put up with the US cut when the film was first transmitted. Ironically, a set of negatives of the UK version were found in the BBC vaults and slotted into the 1999 restoration that Hodges supervised for the BFI.

By that time, Get Carter had gone from being a cult favourite to a genre landmark that was studied on university courses. Academic Steve Chibnall published a definitive guide three years after Sylvester Stallone had fronted Stephen Kay's Get Carter, a 2000 remake that was considered so inferior that it didn't ever merit a release in UK cinemas. Hodges was anything but impressed in commenting, 'I couldn't stop them remaking it and I don't know why they did. For all the money they spent they could have made plenty of original films.

However, Caine gave the project his blessing by taking on the role of Cliff Brumby, just as Kenneth Branagh's 2007 remake would see him assume the Laurence Olivier role of Andrew Wyke, while passing on to Jude Law the character of Milo Tindle that he had earned him an Oscar nomination in Joseph L. Mankiewicz's adaptation of Anthony Shaffer's Sleuth (1972). Perhaps Caine was trying to put into practice the advice he had been given when he had bumped into someone from his old manor, who had killed around 11 people without ever being charged. He had berated Caine at a London disco for the film's heavy-handed violence and for its failure to show that most gangsters were married men seeking to provide for their families. Caine had been about to tell the hoodlum that he had been the model for Carter, when he declared the film the 'biggest load of crap I've seen in my life'.

Although Lewis's sequels, Jack Carter's Law (1974) and Jack Carter and the Mafia Pigeon (1977), were never filmed, the character was fascinatingly teamed in the 2011 third volume of Alan Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series with Vic Dakin, who had been played with simmering rage by Richard Burton in Michael Tuchner's Villain (1971). This was released in the same year thar Lewis published Plender, which was reworked for the screen by Marc Barbier as The Serpent (2006), which starred Clovis Cornillac, who will be better known to many for his partnership with Gérard Depardieu in Pierre Tchernia's Asterix At the Olympic Games (2008).

Half a century after its appearance, Get Carter sits at the apex of a cinematic family tree that would keep crime aficionados busy for a week. The pick came at the start of the next decade and saw London mobster Harold Shand (Bob Hoskins) slip out of his depth in John MacKenzie's The Long Good Friday (1980). Over in Hollywood, Quentin Tarantino applied the lessons he had learned to Reservoir Dogs (1992), while Steven Soderbergh paid homage in The Limey (1999), which he claimed was 'Get Carter made by Alain Resnais' and starred Caine's erstwhile flatmate, Terence Stamp. But the biggest domestic impact was on Guy Ritchie's Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998), which single-handedly launched BritCrime.

TV criminality also got a shot in the arm from Get Carter, with George Sewell joining forces with Patrick Mower in Special Branch (1973-74), John Thaw and Dennis Waterman teaming up in The Sweeney (1974-78) and Gordon Jackson doling out the orders to Martin Shaw and Lewis Collins in The Professionals (1977-80). More recently, the creators of Life on Mars (2006-07) and its spin-off, Ashes to Ashes (2008-10), have acknowledged their debt to Hodges's opus, whose historical backdrop informed Simon Cellan Jones and Pedr James's Our Friends in the North, which harked back to the shaming of Newcastle City Council leader, T. Dan Smith, who was also the subject of an eponymous 1987 docudrama by the Tyne-based Amber Collective that had also captured the scars on the local landscape in Seacoal (1985). In turn, the BBC series influenced The Red Riding Trilogy (2008), which chronicled various stories relating to the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper.

Back on the big screen, Guy Ritchie's Snatch, Paul McGuigan's Gangster No.1 (both 2000), Shane Meadows's Dead Man's Shoes and Matthew Vaughn's Layer Cake (both 2004) all bore Carter's fingerprints, as would such Hollywood offerings as Robert Rodriguez's Sin City (2005) and David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises (2007). All are available to rent in a format to suit you from Cinema Paradiso.

Having reunited with Caine on Pulp (1972), Hodges also revisited Carter territory in Croupier, as did Caine himself in Daniel Barber's Harry Brown (2009), a Brit variation on Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino (2008) that saw a Marine veteran conduct a one-man war against the lowlifes who had corrupted his neighbourhood. Some critics baulked at the film's moral subtext and political agenda. But it also demonstrated that, even at the age of 76, the biggest man on the block was still Michael Caine.