For Get Carter, the able Michael Caine checked in his likable working-class-bloke persona to play a very unlikable working-class bloke, London gangster Jack Carter. Heading "up north" to get to the bottom of the recent death of his brother, he runs afoul of the local color, who don't appreciate his meddling. Not content to accept the police report of suicide, Carter begins investigating. He encounters the local mob boss, his sleazy chauffeur with eyes like "piss holes in the snow," and the lovely town porn star. The film moves along at a leisurely pace, until Carter finds out the grim truth. The final third of the film has Jack Carter on the vengeance path. No one in this film gets a happy ending. When it's over, you feel as though you need to wipe the soot off yourself and go stand under a sun lamp. The British board of tourism would prefer you didn't watch this film. --Kristian St. Clair
2.
A small-time street tough from London finds himself enmeshed in a web of deceit, blackmail, and murder when he investigates the circumstances surrounding the death of his brother in Newcastle. GET CARTER is a hard-as-nails British crime movie, featuring a brutal performance by Michael Caine that stands as one of his best. The film is based on the novel JACK'S RETURN HOME by Ted Lewis. It was remade for a blaxploitation audience a year later as HIT MAN, and in 2000 Sylvester Stallone starred in a remake, with Michael Caine making an appearance in the film as well.
3.
Double Academy Award winner Michael Caine plays the relentless title character, an ice-cold, efficiently lethal London mobster investigating his brother's death in the seedy Newcastle underworld.
A signature neo-noir classic from the director of The Terminal Man and A Prayer For The Dying.
4.
Released in 1971 (the same year Straw Dogs and A Clockwork Orange hit the screens, which must make 71 the annus mirabilis for violent films set in Britain), Get Carter opens with gangsters leering over pornographic slides and ends on a filthy, slag-stained beach in Newcastle. It's a low-down and dirty movie from beginning to end, and possibly the grittiest and best film of its kind to come out of Britain. The granddaddy of Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels and all its ilk, director Mike Hodges' Get Carter offers revenge tragedy swinging-60s style, all nicotine-stained cinematography, shabby locations and the kind of killer catchphrases Vinnie Jones would die for ("You're a big man, but you're in bad shape. With me, it's a full-time job. Now behave yourself", says Michael Caine's deadpan anti-hero Carter before inflicting a few choice punches on Brian Mosley, aka Coronation Street's Alf Roberts, to name but one example from Hodges and Ted Lewis' exquisitely laconic script).
Presenting the dark horse in his family of loveable Cockney geezer roles (Alfie, The Italian Job), Michael Caine plays the title role of Jack Carter, a man so hard he barely registers a flicker of regret watching a woman he's just had sex with plunge to her death. After taking the train up to Newcastle as the credits roll and Roy Budd's chunky bass-heavy theme tune plays, Carter returns to his hometown to attend his brother's funeral and investigate the circumstances of his death. Not that he's all that sentimental about family: he shaves nonchalantly over the open coffin, and shows affection to his niece Doreen (Petra Markham) by cramming a few notes in her hand and telling her to "be good and don't trust boys". Gradually, Carter unravels the skein of drugs, pornography and corruption tangled around his brother's death, which brings him up against supremely oleaginous kingpin Kinnear (played by the author of Look Back in Anger John Osborne) among others. A remake starring Sylvester Stallone is in the offing, but quite frankly it will be a 30-degree (Celsius) Christmas night in Newcastle before Hollywood could ever make something as assured, raw and immortal as this. --Leslie Felperin
Mooviees.com is not the official site for this film.
All editorial views and opinions expressed here are for entertainment purposes only.
Movie Database
In Theaters
