In Mike Hodges 1971 crime classic 'Get
Carter' we meet Jack Carter. Jack Carter (Michael Caine)
is a bad man. Seriously. This dude is just
awful. Carter will shoot you, stab you, punch, slap you,
poison you, sleep with your girl… even if this girl belongs to
his boss or his own brother… Jack Carter just doesn't
care. But then Jack, some kind of gangster enforcer in
London, gets word that his brother has died under some
mysterious circumstances. Now it's time to go back home
and get to the truth. Knowing Jack as we will come to
know Jack, and like the folks in his home town already know
Jack, they should've shot Jack Carter the minute he stepped
off the metro.
Carter gets into town, even though his bosses back in London
told him not to go, but Carter isn't one to listen too good,
and he starts asking questions. Now Jack Carter isn't
exactly something one would call a detective in his line of
questioning, not exactly the clever kind unearthing nuggets of
information within the words of lies, or reading between the
lines, but Carter's approach is still effective,
nonetheless. Carter knows his brother wasn't much
of a drinker so him getting stone cold drunk and driving off a
bridge rings untrue, just as the notion that he was depressed
about something and decided to end his own life does not sound
like the truth.
So Carter digs a little deeper, along with a friend of his
brother's in Keith the barkeep (Alun Armstrong), to find some
answers and the more Carter digs the more that certain people
in town want him to stop digging. Take poor Keith for
instance, a nice kid if ever there was one, just trying to do
the right thing. Keith learned that helping Jack Carter
is really bad for one's health, and to add insult to Keith's
injury, Jack is completely unsympathetic to the fact that
Keith found injury while helping him. The ability to
feel is not one of Carter's gifts.
But don't think that Carter is a complete
monster, oh no, as he is truly fond of his niece Doreen (Petra
Markham). Almost in a fatherly way. And while
Cater is certainly a bad man, but if you want to make a bad
man worse, do some harm to Doreen. And Carter has
figured out what led to his brother's death, he's figured it's
somehow tied to something bad that happened to Doreen, and has
also surmised that local heavy Cyril Kinnear (John Osborne) is
behind all of it. Thus, to rectify this, people will
need to get shot, thrown off buildings, drowned, drugged,
stabbed, brutalized and framed. All in a days work for
Jack Carter.
Forty plus years after the fact 'Get Carter' is still a very
interesting film in a number of ways. I imagine one
could call it an action thriller, though the style and pacing
of the film could hardly stand up to the hyper standards which
constitute an action thriller these days. This is an
action thriller stripped bare of all pretense, one that
focuses almost solely on it main character, and this main
character gives us as little as humanly possible. While
the mystery of who killed Carter's brother and why, is the
force that drives Jack Carter forward, it's not the force that
drives the film. Michael Caine is what makes 'Get
Carter' the classic it is often recognized as being as I spent
the majority of the film attempting to figure out what drives
Jack Carter, more so than the chicanery which resulted in the
untimely death of his brother.
Carter is back home in Newcastle to find out what really
happened to his brother, even though he didn't seem to care
about this brother all that much, so why all the concern
now? Even though this is kind of left open, we can only
assume that Jack Carter lives by the rule that 'I can do my
people wrong, but nobody else can'. Then there was the
relationship between Carter and his niece, clearly the only
person on the planet who can elicit even the slightest bit
emotion from Cater that isn't centered on violence or sex,
which throws the mythos of Jack Carter into even more murkier
waters.
While Michael Caine clearly drives this film as he is in
almost every single scene, the supporting performances are
also impressive, particularly the late John Osborne as the
slippery Kinnear. I would call Kinnear the villain
of this piece, but I think we all know the real villain in
'Get Carter' is Jack Carter himself, the other characters
littering the landscape just being slightly less vile versions
of Carter. However watching Osborne glide in and out of
the room with his superior, 'I'm so much better than all of
you' attitude, which was in direct contrast to Carter's
unabashed, unashamed criminal behavior, made for an
interesting dichotomy. It's too bad that John Osborne
was such a noted writer because he was also a darn good actor.
'Get Carter' earns its stripes as a classic very
honestly. A great performance from Michael Caine at the
prime of his career, sparsely but crisply directed by Mike
Hodges, simply written but deceptively complex, mostly due to
Mr. Caine's performance, 'Get Carter' is British crime cinema
at near its very best.
