Is it possible to aim for authenticity in art, and through sheer technical excellence, end up reaching an even loftier plateau?
Get Carter is the story of Jack Carter (Michael Caine) a legbreaker for the London syndicate who returns to his poor, industrial, hometown of Newcastle to look into the recent suspicious death of his brother.
Carter is warned by his employers not to make waves with the Northern mob, who are in league with his employers, but makes it his single-minded obsession to get to the bottom of what happened.
Carter arrives in Newcastle and immediately begins making waves with old acquaintances in the local mob including Eric Paice (Ian Hendry), a fellow leg breaker working on behalf of local boss Cyril Kinnear (John Osborne).
Before long Carter is dodging not only the local mob but a pair of psychopathic killers his own firm have sent to bring him back home as he tears through the network of dope dealers and pornographers working under Kinnear.
As the violence escalates, Carter realizes the corruption strikes as close to home as his 16 year old niece Doreen (Petra Markham), and any semblance of restraint is lost as he gets closer to the truth and his ultimate revenge.
Get Carter is one of the five greatest British films ever made.
It began life as a business conceit from producer Michael Klinger: British film censorship rules had been relaxed to the point where realistic depictions of organized crime were possible, and given that the real life Kray Twins had captured the British public’s imagination a slew of hard boiled gangster pictures had arrived on the scene.
Klinger believed that these films had sanitized the violence and cruelty of men like the Krays, and sought to make a film that would embody the horror and moral decay of organized crime effectively. Klinger purchased the rights to Ted Lewis’s novel Jack’s Return Home, hired an ITV director known for gritty, documentary style projects in Mike Hodges, and secured the services of Michael Caine who was not only the biggest star in the country at the time but who shared Klinger’s desire to depict the gangsters he had known in his youth without the sheen of Hollywood.
Producer, writer, director, and star set out with a clear goal: authenticity, without romance. Violence, without heroism. Nasty people in a nasty place, doing nasty things.
That’s an understandable artistic mission statement, but somehow all the elements came together and created a film that was more than the sum of its parts.
Caine’s Carter is a ruthless man, capable of remorseless violence at a moment’s notice but Caine lends him such a gravitas and dignity by virtue of his performance that we truly sympathize with him by film’s end, perhaps more than the filmmakers intended, because we sense in him a moral center that has not been completely corrupted. There are things he won’t stoop to and crucially– money doesn’t justify anything.
Carter’s mission is suicidal: he’s a lone operative staring down two different crime syndicates in a town he’s lost touch with and lacking any kind of back up.
In a darkly ironic twist he never even cared much for his brother and his niece is hinted to be his daughter. He’s cold to barmen and hoodlums, and women of the night alike. However, just as Sam Spade avenged a partner he didn’t care for at the end of The Maltese Falcon, Carter works to get closure for his brother because it’s the right thing to do.
And so, we experience a protagonist who would have simultaneously scandalized a 1971 audience for his brutality, but also presents a strange kind of point of reference.
Britain, who won two World Wars and has never truly recovered, is a diminished nation. Newcastle, once an industrial and shipping hub for the Victorian empire, is diminished into concrete brutalism. Jack Carter is a thug and an adulterer– but he has not completely given away his soul and he has retained a modicum of respectability that is even more important than survival.
The release features a 4K transfer and a new DTS-HD 2.0 Master Audio mix both sourced from the BFI’s 2022 release. Extras include two commentary tracks, introduction by Michael Caine, featurettes, and original trailer.
Get Carter is a brutal neo-noir where misery is heaped upon misery; where death is sudden and without dignity; where everyone pays dearly in the name of making a quick buck.
Somehow, it is also more– it is an elegy for a fallen empire, a memory of the hero’s past viewed through a lens, darkly. It is a masterpiece.
Highest Recommendation.
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