Red-Barracuda
Get Carter is sometimes described as one of the best British gangster films. This isn't a very accurate statement as Get Cater is the actual very best British Gangster film and one of the best British films of any kind overall. It's typified by a fantastically nasty performance from Michael Caine in the role of Jack Carter, the London based gangster who travels back home to Newcastle to find out who killed his brother. Caine is truly brilliant here in a role that shows how great an actor he is, this is a very amoral central character and Caine never shrinks away from depicting him as a seriously cold individual. Generally speaking, there is a very short supply of truly 'good' characters in this one. Even the most sympathetic people have something shady attached to them.The location is another trump card. The Newcastle of the early 70's makes for a supremely bleak setting. It was a deprived city of run down tenements and dying industries. This feeling of decay and ruin really seeps into the story and makes for a magnificent backdrop for this nihilistic crime story. It shows quite clearly that UK film-makers have too rarely ventured out into the provinces to makes films which is a terrible mistake as the Newcastle setting is quite unique, distinctive and brilliant here.The story-line also is a big plus point. It takes the form of the most unusual of genre combinations, the mystery/crime film. As soon as Carter hits the scene, he causes serious ripples in the waters of the criminal underworld. As he goes about his business we are able to piece more and more parts of the jigsaw together and ultimately learn what it was that went down and why it happened in the first place. Carter is quite an unusual protagonist as we are definitely on his side, given that his antagonists in the criminal network are so awful. But while we will him on, he still commits some horrendous actions including the murder of a woman. But it's the very fact that the film doesn't play easy with you that is one of the reasons that makes this such a satisfying and bold film. To top it all off, it has a truly great theme tune by Roy Budd that captures the feel of the film perfectly. A true all-time classic.
jimpayne1967
I first saw Get Carter when I was 15 when it was shown on ITV. The film was cut heavily- mainly by the broadcaster- and remember that it was the talk of the school the next morning. Admittedly a lot of the schoolboy discussion centred on the scenes in which Geraldine Moffat and, especially, Britt Ekland bare their breasts but there was enough realisation amongst my friends of nearly 40 years ago that Get Carter was rather a good picture.The film enjoys as high a reputation now as it ever has. Even in the late nineteen nineties when it and the original Ted Lewis novel on which it is based were re-released reviews were mixed. Part of the problem that people had , and I would imagine still have, with Get Carter is that people could not accept Caine as such a despicable figure as Carter proves to be. I had, in early 1976, only ever seen Caine in Zulu and a terrible film with Jane Fonda (Hurry Sundown I think) when I first saw Get Carter all those years ago so had less of a preconceived notion of what Caine should be like so he just seemed like a great 'baddie' who, eventually, gets his comeuppance (but only after the other baddies get what they deserve) but I can see now why at the time people who had loved Caine in the Harry Palmer films or in the Italian Job or as Alfie ( though I think that character is actually a swine)were aghast at this lovable rogue pouring whisky down Ian Hendry's throat prior to smashing his head in or throwing Bryan Mosley off a multi-story car park. And he treats women abominably. The film is criticised because it shows a lot of violence towards women - with other violence being implied- and I can see why people are uncomfortable with that but this is a gangster movie and gangsters are not nice people. I think it is a more legitimate criticism that the female characters are weak/submissive/untrustworthy but even so the most sympathetic character in the film is Carter's niece ( Doreen) and she is the one character who shows a kinder, even sensitive side of Carter.The film is now almost regarded as one of those dreaded 'national treasures' with some of its more famous lines like Ian Hendry's character Eric Paice having eyes like 'two pissholes in the snow' or the architects who remark after Carter throws Brumby off that car park ' I don't think we are going to get our fee' or a bystander in the post office who on being told about the man being thrown from that car park asks 'was he dead?' suggest a bit of jollity that is more in line with the Caine of The Italian Job but it is in truth a gritty, uncomfortable picture that even now seems pretty visceral. Although there is no hint of the supernatural in Get Carter the film made after it which is most like it in some ways is Eastwood's underrated High Plains' Drifter in which Eastwood's character wreaks similar havoc as an outsider arriving in a village that had some grisly secrets it wishes to be kept hiddenGet Carter is very much Caine's picture but John Osborne as the number one villain Kinnear as well as the aforementioned Hendry and Mosley provide great support and I have always liked Moffat as the flaky, lush, sports car driving girlfriend of Kinnear. Alan Armstrong - now a very highly respected actor- makes one of his earliest appearances and is pretty good and for a film set in Newcastle upon Tyne his is one of the few local accents heard. Ekland looks very nice in her black undies though I will admit that this particular scene serves little in the way of dramatic point.The film looks great with some great location shots of a Newcastle that does not seem to exist anymore and the Roy Budd score is superb- the title sequence in which the main theme is played as carter makes his train journey North is a magnificent scene setter in the class of Touch of Evil. I really like Get Carter and think it is one of the Holy Trinity of Brit Gangster films alongside the 1947 Brighton Rock and 1980's The Long Good Friday. It is brutal and the characters almost uniformly amoral but the story is neatly rounded out and the ending surprising but satisfactory. It is rather more than just seeing Britt Ekland in her pants as I and my old school chums once thought it mainly was.
paul-337-540260
My original interpretation of the cinematographer/director's style was that it was placing the camera in the position of someone spying on the scene. I think the word "spy" though is wrong. It is the position of a voyeur. The rough, hand-held style relied on a "foreground obstruction" aesthetic, too -- the motion of the camera and the intervening objects/people divided our attention between the story as an objective thing, and made me at least feel as though we are seeing found footage from a documentary that is asking us to form an opinion from a mass of distracting elements.Later, the obstructions, distractions, and extras change from being incidental to the story to becoming central to the story.I got the sense right away that Jack Carter had come home to figure out what happened to his brother. He clearly didn't buy the drunk driving accident myth. And yet Jack shaving over his brother's coffin (showing no respect) and then his covering his brother's face (showing respect) communicates ambiguity about Jack's character. Is he an anti-hero taking on a moral vendetta, standing in for any of us who have seen or been victim to injustice? Or is he something else? The sex started out as fun, and the women were beautiful. The way it was shot (the rocking chair scene, for example) used women in the foreground (or, Britt's legs in the foreground) to bring them forward in our awareness without them being the main plane of focus (either Jack on the phone or Britt's beautiful and erotic face). The rocking chair evoked the sounds and rhythms of sex but was absurdly quirky - a real point of humor, I think, but the beginning of how the director starts to blend sex, violence and humor. We also see at the end of the rocking horse scene that the phone sex was not with Jack's monogamous partner, but that he was deeply in the erotic imagination of a woman attached to another man, and he was forcefully and unapologetically going to exploit his position there. Even though what we learn about Jack in the rocking chair scene by itself happens to thousands or millions of people, in the context of the shaving scene and his penchant for paying people to do his bidding (at their risk) or to non-apologize apologize, we begin to see him as emotionally ill or detached. Not just an anti-hero.Also early in the movie when there is a sex scene, before the audience gets a chance to let their heart slow down, bad guys show up to menace Jack - with the timing of the arrival of bad guys quickly converging precisely on the moment of intercourse. Jack confidently wields a large gun and forces bad guys onto the street, following after them with no compunction, is funny ... but at the same time showing something menacing about Jack. A lack of shame becomes somehow foreshadowing for a deep lack of morality or empathy.So now we get to the question: Is he a psychopath? The cruel language he uses with women, his roughness with them, particularly in the beginning, could perhaps at the time be understood as a grieving brother amidst prostitutes who were hiding information about his brother's death. But from 2015 -- and from the perspective of what we learn about Jack by the end of the movie -- he was a misogynist. Indeed, the disturbing scene where he gives his ex-brother's lover/regular prostitute an overdose shows him as calculating and without any empathy.It's interesting to me that the core moment when Jack learns the motivation for everyone's bad before -- seeing Doreen in a porn film -- he goes from enjoying the film to being devastated. This is precisely what I was going through. I loved the beautiful women in the film and was willing to suspend my critique of their characters for some cinematic pleasure. But as the characters were having sex, the director was presenting them to us as a voyeur. The director's style was voyeuristic, and he had successfully made me a voyeur as well. That transition of the viewer's role is disturbing. And Jack goes from that moment of "harmless" and pleasurable porn viewing and fantasy to a realization of the depth of exploitation involved.The ending is covered in filth, waste, inhumanity. When Jack finally kills the man responsible for his brother's death, his grim, angry face doesn't just laugh, it cackles. Has he cracked? The article I linked to above makes that case, but I don't think so. That would imply he has, at that point, lost his moral code. I think he never had one. So the laugh, in my view, is instead a proof point: He is a psychopath. And so, when he ultimately is shot in the head and lies in the filthy tide, I was shocked, but not, in the least, sad. After the police show up at the mansion and pull all the partiers outside, the director presents them to us -- almost as a line-up. (He is cutting between this and other scenes). These people, formerly drugged-up, naked, and otherwise debauched, looked like a cross-section of English society. After a movie of being a voyeur looking at the dangerous world of gangster violence and sex, we now find ourselves looking at ... ourselves.
