Get Carter (1971)
If The Italian Job celebrated Britain's 1960s supremacy
in everything from football (soccer to you lot on the left hand
side of the Atlantic) to small-car design through the medium of
the crime film, Get Carter was the opposite side off the
coin, a signifier that Britain was lurching into the polyester
decade of industrial disputes, the Yorkshire Ripper and the
ascendancy of the colour brown. This movie coldly announced that
the party was over.
The genius of the film is to switch the setting of Ted Lewis'
novel from Doncaster to Newcastle, which at the time was trapped
between its declining industrial heritage and corrupt regeneration
schemes.
Abetted by Roy Budd's sparse, haunting soundtrack, Mike Hodges
shoots the city as an alien planet - grey and menacing, populated
by hard-faced cows and weaselly, treacherous thugs engaged in
futile spirals of loveless sex and sudden, flesh-tearing
explosions of violence - Very English, low-tech violence, with
fists, boots and the occasional rusty shotgun.
The strange atmosphere of the film is also helped by the
casting, with its scattering of future TV stars - Minder's
chirpy barman Dave (Glynn Edwards) as an amateur porn star,
playwright John Osborne as improbably well-spoken Geordie
godfather Kinnear, and (most famously) Alf Roberts (Bryan Mosley)
from Coronation Street as a slot-machine king.
Into this world strides Michael Caine, enigmatic and chilling -
an angel of death in a well-cut belted raincoat - as gangland
enforcer Jack Carter, out to avenge his brother's murder and
possessed by a fury whose source remains ambiguous.
 It's a grim and grimy quest that's low on jokes, but full of
tar-black gallows humour and eminently quotable one-liners.
None
better than in Caine's opening exchange with sinister chauffeur
Eric (Ian Hendry). As he takes his leave, Caine pulls Eric's
shades off to remind himself what his eyes look like.
"They're still the same" he deadpans. "Two piss
holes in the snow".
Later, Carter notes "I know you didn't kill him" as
he plunges his knife into the stomach of a local mobster (Edwards)
who merely witnessed his brother's murder. Caine notes that what
was so shocking was the "simplicity and professionalism"
of the act. "It's one stab wound and you're dead".
Still the perfect antidote to public schoolboy directors
glorifying East End villains, it almost anticipates them in
another of the film's best lines; "Clever bastard, eh?"
snarls one of Kinnear's card-playing cronies at Carter.
"Only
comparatively", he shoots back.
It's a big film, and it's still in exceptionally good shape
these days. Even if you do feel like you need a shower after
watching it.
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