Review of Get Carter (1971) by Tsubaki S — 02 Sep 2011

The debut of Mike Hodges, who got his start working for Granada Television and World In Action. He chose for his debut Ted Lewis' 1969 novel Jack's Return Home, and Hodges got one of Britain's biggest actors for the lead.

Even to this day, it's still a good, gritty gangster film, with a brilliant location and some quite graphic violence for it's day. It has gangster Jack Carter (Michael Caine), who works for British mob boss Gerald Fletcher (Terence Rigby) in London.

Carter is returning to his hometown of Newcastle, as his brother Frank was killed in an apparant drink-drive accident. But something isn't right, and Frank's daughter Doreen (Petra Markham) feels it was out of character for Frank to die that way.

So, Jack stays around in Newcastle and sets out to investigate. It leads him from local crime kingpin Cyril Kinnear (John Osborne) to temperamental local businessman Cliff Brumby (Bryan Mosley). Although Brumby seems like a red herring, he knows something, but then Jack discovers Doreen was used in a porn film funded by Kinnear, and Jack ends up hunting his brother's killers, and they're hunting him.

It's a grim-up-north gangster film, but the locations in Newcastle act as a character throughout the film, and Caine has rarely been as gritty as this. It's violent, but there's something blackly comic about the proceedings too.

But, it has a good cast, rounded out by Ian Hendry, Britt Eckland and Alun Armstrong.