Now get the son of Get Carter

IF it's not the very best, then Mike Hodges's Get Carter is certainly the most familiar British gangster film ever made. It doesn't even matter if you haven't seen it. We all know Michael Caine's Jack Carter, stalking across the wastes of Newcastle in his black trenchcoat, puffing on his Gitane fag with vengeance on his mind. And then there are the quotes.

"You're a big man, but you're in bad shape," snarls Caine at one of his innumerable adversaries. Or Caine caught in the buff wearing only a double-barrelled shotgun: "C'mon, Jack.

Put it away. You know you won't use it." And Hodges's own favourite - used by Carter on another squirming victim: "Do you want to go to the toilet, Albert?" In person, Mike Hodges doesn't look like the kind of person to shove you into an outside lav for a good going over. The quietly amiable 66-year-old filmmaker looks more like an urbane academic than a cult pulp director. But first impressions of the man don't dispel the chilling reputation of his work; even Michael Caine described Get Carter as "a very violent film". "I don't like violent films myself," Hodges surprisingly admits. "I don't see them very often. So it wasn't that sort of attraction. But having made the decision to direct the film, I had to go to the absolute with it. I'm not justifying myself," he says leaning forward over the restaurant table, "because I think Carter stands up for itself." And so it has. Probably no other British film has influenced world moviemakers - from Hong Kong's John Woo to the latest Tinsel-town Tarantino - as much as Get Carter. Nevertheless, back in 1971, the critics savaged the film for its incessant brutality. George Melly, the Observer's ultra-liberal critic, even likened it to "a bottle of neat gin swallowed before breakfast". At the time, Hodges said people were upset because Caine's Carter "is so cold, unremitting and irredeemable". True, Carter must be about as anti as an antihero can get, turning on his enemies - stabbing one in the stomach, heaving another over a high-rise and force-feeding a prostitute with a heroin overdose - before he shoots his old pal with a double blast at point blank range. This mayhem has not only inspired young movie mavericks like Guy Ritchie of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, it has also - predictably - led to the film being serialised in Loaded as a comic strip. "In the script, Carter was softer and sleazier than he was in the final film," says Hodges by way of explanation. "But Michael Caine gave him an edge - he really knew Carter and made him more ruthless. Remember when he's in that Newcastle bar and he asks for his drink - "In a thin glass"? Nobody forgets that moment. And you know why? In the script, Carter says 'Please'. But Michael left it out, and that little choice just makes Carter even more terrifying. He was such a shit that I couldn't imagine any star would risk his reputation playing him." In fact, stars were more than willing to take on the role. MGM first tried to foist Kojak's Telly Savalas onto Hodges and then Jose Ferrer. The studio also tried to twist the young director's arm in other insidious ways. "Having a star in the film did give the violence a touch of glamour, but I was determined to make his character unpleasant and to have him die at the end. There was quite a bit of pressure on me to let him live because they would have loved a sequel. But I felt, because I went as far as I did with the violence, that he had to be disposed of as casually as he disposed of other people. That was the morality of the piece." Hodges was - and still is - surprised by the audience reaction to his blazing debut. When he started out filming, he says he didn't realise what sort of impact all the pulled punches and blank shots would have when the whole film was put together. "I assumed that, like me, the audience would hate Carter and would also be shocked by the film. But what surprised and frightened me in many ways was that they actually liked him." As a result, Hodges went on to make Pulp, a seldom seen "bookend" to his first film, again starring Caine, which asked why we glamorize rather than reject gangster-figures like Jack Carter. From there, like many of his contemporaries trained in the golden age of Sixties TV, Hodges worked on both sides of the Atlantic, as a studio director for hire and as an independent writer-director. But the creative freedom won for him by Carter slipped out of his grasp and there were long-lasting rows and even longer hauls between assignments. He publicly disowned his IRA thriller A Prayer for the Dying in 1987 because MGM tried to turn Mickey Rourke into "an Irish Rambo", and, while his supernatural tragedy Black Rainbow won critical plaudits in 1989, four years before, his Gryff Rhys Jones comedy Morons from Outer Space provoked succinct advice from an acerbic critic: "Die before you see this film." Before he can be dismissed as a one-off director, though, Hodges makes it clear that, as of now, he's back to his best; he wants "to fight for" Croupier, a taut casino-based film noir he made last year that's already been hailed in the LA Times as Hodges's finest film and in another LA paper as "a diamond-hard masterpiece". It stars a steely-eyed Clive Owen as the croupier content to play God at the gambling tables dealing out fate to the suckers, until trouble looms in the hourglass shape of Alex Kingston, a South African high roller who makes doe-eyes across the blue baize. SOME might argue that Clive Owen's Jack Manfred in Croupier is a true son of Caine's Jack Carter; and Hodges admits a link between the two. "If you watch Michael Caine move, his whole thinking process is deliberate and carefully worked out. I think Owen in Croupier is similarly meticulous." What can't be argued, is Hodges's determination to battle for his own unique vision - "I don't want to make films that are the same as everybody else's." And for that reason he dismisses the proposed Hollywood remake of Get Carter with Sly Stallone as featuring "a total lack of imagination". But is he bitter that he's only been able to make eight films in his career and that it's been almost 10 years since his last feature? "I'm not much of a hustler," he concedes. "But given the way things could have turned out, I'm always astonished that my messages in bottles, as I think of my films, ever got off the ground at all. Astonished, but very happy too." Get Carter is re-released today. Croupier is released on 18 June. Mike Hodges is interviewed at the National Film Theatre on 18 June at NFT 1. Information: 0171 928 3232.

Copyright 1999
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.