GET CARTER: 4K UHD Blu-ray (MGM, 1971) BFI

Michael Caine is the proverbial cookie full of arsenic in Mike Hodges’ Get Carter (1971), a brazenly nihilistic crime/thriller to navigate the oft’ salacious and thoroughly seedy undercarriage of Britain’s working class. The picture is, by and large, an anathema to all those mid-60’s representations of swingin’ London, while Caine – then, age 38 – could hardly be counted upon for consideration as the quintessence of that generation’s angry youth. Arguably, the role of cold, calculating hit man, Jack Carter is Caine’s finest hour. Without a doubt, it marks a turning point in the actor’s career. Caine had begun his journey to stardom playing variations on the lovable bastard. Yet, in Get Carter he drops the ‘lovable’ part to go full-on ruthless and maniacal anti-hero in what is ultimately a spiraling revenge/tragedy with one of the most shocking dénouements in screen history. Mostly set in the perpetually dank and dystopian landscape of ‘then’ contemporary Newcastle and Gateshead, Get Carter does not thunder across the screen with jet-propelled action. Rather, it builds to its decidedly ill-fated climax. This, of course, is in keeping with Hodges’ desire to make a ‘realistic picture’ – “an autopsy” of contemporary societal ills. In hindsight, Hodge’s dissection of crime was meant to capitalize on the ‘then’ recent fascination with the conviction of the Kray Twins – Ronald and Reginald. For a generation, these thugs dominated East End London’s organized crime syndicate throughout the 1950’s and early 60’s. 

Get Carter is a deliciously uncompromising exposé of this gritty and scandalous netherworld. Hodges adapted his screenplay from Ted Lewis’ 1969 novel, ‘Jack’s Return Home’, with producer, Michael Klinger approaching the beleaguered Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer for financing and distribution. Get Carter really was the end of the line for MGM, a studio, once considered peerless and unstoppable in the world of popular entertainments. But by 1971, disastrous corporate restructurings had broken the company down to bedrock. The year after Get Carter, MGM shuttered its Borehamwood Studios for good as it prepared for its own takeover and take-down by Las Vegas financier, Kirk Kerkorian.  And despite the picture’s success, for all intent and purposes, this was hardly a picture the likes of which Louis B. Mayer – had he lived – would have approved. Fueled by pianist/composer, Roy Budd’s uncomfortably jazzy riffs, a theme since become an anthem to this dysfunctional epoch in the picture biz, Get Carter’s downtrodden affair would have likely made Mayer ill and his VP, Irving Thalberg cringe.

Viewed today, Get Carter has lost none of its shock value. In its time, it earned a notorious R-rating from the MPAA and X-rating in its native Britain for what was then considered ‘indecent’ content: a few quick flashes of co-stars, Brit Ekland masterbating to phone sex, and, Geraldine Moffat and Rosemarie Dunham’s breasts exposed, considered more offensive than the picture’s ‘overt violence’. In totem, these latter acts were performed by Caine’s reprobate exacting payback on all parties responsible for his brother, Frank’s murder, also to avenge Frank’s teenage daughter, Doreen (Petra Markham) being forced to partake in C-grade porn. To this end, Carter manhandles the affluent, Cliff Brumby (Bryan Mosley), tossing him off the roof of a six-story parking garage, while fatally stabbing former associate, Albert Swift (Glynn Edwards) in the gut several times in a back alley. And lest we forget the brutal moment when Carter, having found out his latest sex partner, Glenda (Geraldine Moffat) was responsible for involving Doreen in porn, held Glenda’s head under water in a bathtub, then tossed her bedraggled self into the boot of a sports car, later to be rear-ended off the side of a pier, to her eventual death.

Cinematographer, Wolfgang Suschitzky drew inspiration from Hodge’s insistence he use long-distance lenses, creating a very documentarian feel, particularly during the crowd scenes. Viewing Get Carter today, one is immediately struck by the starkness of Suschitzky’s work, a lot of over-the-shoulder shots, partially obscured by the back of somebody’s slightly ‘out of focus’ head and shoulders, areas of deep shadow mixed with penetrating streams of stark and wholly unflattering gray light, interesting angles that deliberately cut the tops or sides off of people’s heads (with other action taking place in the not-so-distant background). From a purely visual perspective, Get Carter is far more ‘art house’, less of a venture funded by a declining Hollywood major and much more the little ‘independent’ that could. This alter-realism would never fly with movie audiences today. And yet it works spectacularly in Get Carter, even with the passage of time.

Despite an unexpected strike the first week of shooting, and producer, Klinger’s firmness about Hodges using John Trumper as his editor (the two did not get on, even though Hodges recognized Trumper’s immense contributions to the film), Get Carter’s principal photography went smoothly enough. It could have gone the other way as Klinger was known as a very ‘hands-on’ producer. Nevertheless, on this occasion, he left Hodges and Suschitsky mostly to their own accord. Klinger’s ‘suggestion’ for a climactic car chase was vetoed by Hodges, who convinced him such a sequence would most likely draw an unfair comparison between Get Carter and Peter Yates’ Bullitt (1968).  Hodges’ flat fee of £7,000 to adapt Lewis’ novel was well-deserved, the writer/director retaining the book’s essential structure, but also introducing some minor changes heavily influenced by the crime fiction of Raymond Chandler and – stylistically – cribbing from the B-noir thriller, Kiss Me Deadly (1955).

Lost in translation were Jack Carter’s back story and a voiceover narration, as well as proposed flashbacks to crystalize the relationship between Jack and Frank. Hodges also chose to rework the story so both Brumby and Carter die – dispelling the assertion that just because Carter is the ‘moral agent’ of the piece, it does not stand his penultimate satisfaction will denote a triumph of his relative ‘goodness’ over pure evil. In fact, Get Carter’s finale - the assassination of Jack Carter - dovetails perfectly into Hodge’s ‘eye for an eye’ morality play. Hodges’ excisions/revisions may have streamlined the plot. Yet, in retrospect, he also tended to muddy the essential cohesion of the narrative for the first-time viewer. As Get Carter gets underway, we are not entirely certain where the story is headed. The introduction of our eponymous anti-hero and his discovery of Frank’s body, his queasily flirtatious interactions with Doreen, Frank’s daughter (and thereby Jack’s niece), feeding into the movie’s underlying kink, smut and prostitution subplot with far more vexing ramifications later on.

Also absent in the rewrites, the significance of Jack’s choice of weapon (a double-barrel shotgun, meant to reference happier times when he and Frank used to hunt together), and, the association between both Carter brothers and gangland goon, Albert Swift, as well as Jack’s bitter rivalry with gangster, Eric Paice (Ian Hendry). This is merely grazed in the movie. In Lewis’ novel, Eric brutalizes Jack’s lover, Audrey (rechristened Anna in the screenplay and played by the frisky – if forgettable - Britt Ekland). Undeniably, one of the defining characteristics of Get Carter is its’ overbearing, socially course and environmentally depraved hedonism. Newcastle, with its grayed-out concrete and iron decay, sparse vegetation and cracked cobblestone, its tenements cast in a shadowy pall of sooty foothills behind a colliery; Gateshead, dominated by Trinity Square – a poured concrete monolith, representational of postmodernist architecture imposing itself upon an otherwise ‘traditional’ landscape of weathered cottage-styled houses and ramshackle of indie-owned shops; the apocalyptic, windswept Blackhall Beach near Hartlepool, with its steely-gray, mechanized colliery towers and conveyors. All of these superbly chosen locales greatly contribute to the overall sense of hopelessness, dread and foreboding closing in on our anti-hero. 

Get Carter opens with a discombobulated shot of Caine’s Jack, immaculately suited, looking bored through a high-rise window. The camera dollies in until the dimly lit interior fills the frame. Jack is entertaining…well…sort of. In the days before home video, organized crime overlords, Gerald (Terence Rigby) and Sid Fletcher (John Bindon) are amusing themselves with a pornographic slideshow. Jack works for these brutes. But he is despondent and decidedly not amused by their enjoyment. Jack’s distraction stems from the sudden death of his brother, Frank. But who killed Frank? Gerald and Sid advise Jack to leave well enough alone. Instead, Jack takes the first train from London to his old stomping grounds in Newcastle. Roy Budd’s palpitating theme kicks in under the main titles for the ride home. For those familiar with the movie, Jack’s own assassin is already on the trail. Jack has been bedding Gerald’s plaything, Anna for some time. In fact, Jack toyed with the idea of making a clean break with Anna to parts unknown in South America.

But then, Frank died. As they say, blood is thicker than water – or semen, in this case. The notion Frank died in a drunk-driving accident does not wash with Jack, neither with Frank’s daughter, Doreen, who turns Jack onto her father’s evasive mistress, Margaret (Dorothy White) for a few clues into the mystery. Margaret is not exactly forthcoming, despite Jack’s forcefulness. Later on, the implication arises that Jack – not Frank – might actually be Doreen’s father.  Jack is empathetic toward Doreen, tossing her a few bucks and encouraging her to come with Anna and him to South America. She is not particularly interested in this latter prospect, but takes his money just the same.

Jack’s next port of call is the Newcastle Racecourse, where he hopes to put pressure on Albert Swift – an old acquaintance with underworld connections. Seeing Jack approaching, Albert ducks out. But Eric Paice is also at the races, presently employed as Albert’s chauffeur.  Eric’s artful dodge leaves Jack to tail his limo to a somewhat decaying country estate, home to crime boss, Cyril Kinnear (John Osborne) who has even more ice water running through his veins than Jack. Knocking one of Kinnear’s goons unconscious, Jack bursts in on Kinnear and the Fletchers in a heated poker game. Inebriated sex kitten, Glenda (Geraldine Moffatt) flirts with Jack, almost passing out on his shoulder. This game is being played on several levels, Jack realizing there is nothing to be gained by partaking in the swindle, bows out after learning only superficial details. But a short while later he is paid an unwelcome visit by three of Kinnear’s thugs: Keith (Alun Armstrong), Eddie (Godfrey Quigley) and Thorpe (Bernard Hepton), the latter encouraging Jack to get in their car, suggesting he has been sent as an escort to get him out of town.

Jack sabotages the moment, and then foils their daring escape, kidnapping Thorpe and dragging him up to his rented apartment at the Las Vegas rooming house where he tortures him into giving up the name ‘Cliff Brumby’.  Brumby’s a businessman with a chichi spread and wayward daughter who throws wild parties for her friends while the folks are away. Despite being an arrogant bastard, Brumby is not who Jack is looking for…at least, not yet. Returning to the Las Vegas, Jack attempts to quell the proprietress, Edna’s (Rosemarie Dunham) suspicions by taking her to bed - an easy target and even easier lay. But the next morning, Jack gets a rude awakening when Keith and Eddie return – sent by the Fletchers to ‘collect’ him. Instead, he escapes in a daring shotgun showdown, meeting up with Margaret a short while later. She is still closed-lip. Fletcher’s buffoons reappear, forcing Jack to hotfoot it to relative safety and a waiting car driven by Glenda.

The plot thickens as Glenda drives at breakneck speed to a rooftop restaurant still under construction. Brumby is waiting, along with his two effete architects (John Hussey and Ben Aris).  Brumby fingers Kinnear as Frank’s killer, explaining how Kinnear is trying to muscle in on his business. Knowing what Jack is, Brumby offers him a handsome £5,000 to kill the crime boss. Instead, Jack storms off in a huff. Glenda takes him back to her place for a little badinage. Afterward, she decides to take a bath, leaving Jack to peruse her collection of 16mm homemade porn. One of the movies features Glenda and Margaret and a rather unseemly forced sexual encounter between Albert and Doreen. Shedding a few uncharacteristic tears, Jack strolls into the bathroom, holding Glenda’s head beneath the water for a few moments of contemplation until she confesses the movie was Kinnear’s idea. Half-naked and barely conscious, Jack tosses Glenda into the boot of her car. He hunts Albert down inside a sleazy betting shop. Cornered, Albert confesses he told Brumby that Doreen was Frank’s daughter. It was Brumby who showed Frank the snuff movie, thus inciting him to call the police on Kinnear. Eric, who had arranged for Doreen to be in the movie, then orchestrated two hit men to take care of Frank.

With nothing to lose, and very little left to gain, Jack knifes Albert to death in an alley. But Eric has played his cards very close to his chest, setting up Jack with the Fletchers by revealing his affair with Anna to Gerald. Keith and Eddie pursue Jack to a ferry. Jack shoots Eddie dead while Eric and Keith make their escape, pushing Glenda’s car over the edge of the docks while she is still trapped inside the trunk. Jack has had enough skulking around. It is time for action. And he finds plenty by posting the 16mm snuff movie to the Vice Squad at Scotland Yard. Now, Jack returns to Brumby’s restaurant, beating him senseless, before tossing him off the sixth story of a parking garage. Next, Jack abducts Margaret, telephoning Kinnear and lying about having the porn movie in his possession, negotiating a straight exchange to presumably buy his silence and get what he wants. Jack wants Eric. But he also wants Kinnear. Nothing modest will do.

Jack forces Margaret to strip at gunpoint in an isolated field, giving her a lethal injection and planting her corpse inside Kinnear’s home before telephoning the police, who raid the house shortly thereafter and arrest Kinnear. In the meantime, Eric arrives at Blackhall Beach for his penultimate showdown with Jack. However, unbeknownst to Jack, Eric has also hired his own hit man to dispose of his adversary once and for all. Revenge comes too little/too late for Eric, forced by Jack to consume a whole bottle of whisky, in effect, recreating the scenario of Frank’s ‘accidental death’. Jack beats Eric to death with his rifle butt, depositing the bloody remains into one of the colliery-conveyor dumps. Eric’s body is carried past a few pylons, before being dumped into the turgid waters far below. It might have been divine retribution, except the sniper hired by Eric now takes Jack down with a clean bullet to the head. As Jack collapses in the sand, the tides slowly roll in, soon to carry his corpse out to sea.

Get Carter is an exceptionally bleak crime thriller. Arguably, its’ ending is much more effective today than it was in 1971, as our contemporary cynicism has long since arrived at that perverse satisfaction in witnessing death and destruction on a grand scale. Caine is the superior presence here, straddling the chasm between hero and villain with spectacular finesse. We see through Caine’s monumental disgust where Carter’s vengeance is warranted, but also recognize by the film’s third act just how far afield Jack’s purpose has shifted to blind-sided annihilation. Jack isn’t just out for blood. He is set to self-destruct, becoming the quintessence of that which he purports to oppose.

Fascinating to contemplate what the picture might have been had producer, Klinger taken his cue from MGM’s hierarchy and hired Telly Savalas for the lead – an American name above the title, the studio believed was necessary to solidify its box office. Savalas had yet to break ground on his iconic alter ego – TV’s Kojak – but was a formidable presence in a few high-profile movies throughout the 1960’s; most notably The Dirty Dozen (1967), On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969) and Kelly’s Heroes (1970).  Irrefutably, Get Carter would have benefited from Savalas’ inimitable blend of insane cruelty and courtly culture. But Michael Caine brings a more deeply disturbing quality to the role, a mercilessness firmly grounded in a sense of convoluted propriety. He knows what he is, or rather, the level to which he has sunk, and it doesn’t matter. Caine’s Carter is not out for salvation – just revenge – begun out of love for a lost sibling, but gradually to morph into something far more deliriously demented and wicked.

Get Carter is oft ranked among the greatest British-made crime capers of all time. And yet, kismet prevents it from being a truly great movie. First, is the absence of instantly recognizable faces – at least in America at that time – to compliment Caine’s trend-setting sinner. While the British cast is wonderful, Get Carter’s ever-evolving roster of gritty goons remains largely interchangeable, making whole segments of the story confusing to follow. The screenplay never allows any of Jack’s adversaries to achieve a standout moment that might have truly distinguished them from one another. Second, is Hodges’ screenplay, uneven and spotty at best. Get Carter is a marvelous claptrap of iniquity for its first third, segueing into traditional British mystery for its middle act, before becoming thoroughly unhinged as a perilous revenge/tragedy in its last act finale.

Hodges, arguably, knows these characters inside and out, having lived with his own clear-eyed picture of how it all comes together. But he is not entirely successful at conveying these connections in visual terms. The big reveals that come about as a result of Jack’s skulking, are blunted by a mounting sense of frustrating confusion. What the story lacks in narrative continuity is, therefore made up by Wolfgang Suschitzky’s cinematography, unremittingly dark and oppressive. In essence, Suschitzky’s work gives the audience an illusion, like peeling off the bruised skin of an old banana, to discover even more rot and decay beneath its surface as Jack descends into his own inescapable and emotionless abyss. Jack’s demise is very much a fitting end to his narrow-minded impressions of that tiny corner of the world he occupies and can never escape. Perhaps, intuitively, Jack recognizes he does not belong here – or anywhere, for that matter. There is no place for him. And thus, his quest for revenge evolves into his own death wish.

Although not immediately recognized for its’ gritty realism, Get Carter was something of a passion project for star, Michael Cain, who also acted as co-producer, and on whose personal experiences he had based Jack Carter’s notorious cruelty. MGM’s limited marketing campaign did little to promote the movie state’s side.  In the U.K., critics were begrudgingly appreciative of the picture’s technical proficiency, but put off by the complexity in Hodges’ intrigues, what was then still considered ‘excessive violence’ and ‘amorality’, and, in particular, Jack Carter’s universal lack of contrition. Overlooked, Get Carter faded from view, though arguably, not from memory – acquiring cult status to sustain its reputation, and this, despite its total absence on home video until 1993! Today, one can see more clearly Hodges’ and Caine’s vision for the movie. Indeed, by 1999, Get Carter had risen through the ranks of the BFI as the 16th most iconic British movie made in the 20th century. 

The following year saw an Americanized remake starring Sylvester Stallone (aside: a painful experience to get through). Certain movies come suitable to a time. In an era of social/moral decay and decline, the ‘71 Get Carter played to an audience desperate to eschew this cascade into bad fortune and despair. Arguably, the world has only grown more remote and isolated since.  And thus, viewing Get Carter today, one is immediately teleported into an unflattering epoch to strangely mirror our own place and time. For certain, times have changed. The movie’s lack of environmental protection and laissez faire attitudes toward promiscuity have been overtaken by today’s vices; an overabundance of more transparently politicized filth and corruption, still being trundled in murderous deceit.

To date, there have been two competing home video editions of Get Carter in hi-def; the state’s side Blu released thru Warner Home Video, and this, BFI 4K remastered effort in the U.K. In all regards, the BFI blows WHV out of the water. Get Carter was shot on 35mm Panavision. The BFI have scanned an original negative in 4K and, with input from Mike Hodges, done extensive color grading and clean-up to ensure the film has arrived in UHD in pristine condition, graded in both Dolby Vison and HRD10. The 4K is ‘region free’, meaning it will play anywhere in the world. But the accompanying Blu, where most of the extra features are housed, is coded region ‘B’ and thus requires a region-free 4K player to be viewed. While the Warner Blu suffered from excessive grain that, at times, leans towards an almost digitized appearance, with ruddy orange flesh tones to boot, and, a somewhat muddy rendering of the subdued spectrum of colors, the 4K from BFI sports better resolved grain and takes full advantage of the wider color gamut to reveal the subtleties in Wolfgang Suschitzky’s cinematography. Fine details are very robust, and contrast is exceptionally nuanced. Black levels are inky and undiluted, elevating the somber tone of the movie. Age-related artifacts are not an issue.

We get an LPCM 2.0 mono soundtrack that has been cleaned up and sounds magnificent, with obvious limitations.  Only the newly recorded intro from Michael Caine, an audio commentary featuring Caine, Mike Hodges and Wolfgang Suschitzky (recorded in 2000), and another, exclusively produced for this release, featuring Kim Newman and Barry Forshaw, plus, Roy Budd’s isolated score survive on 4K. The rest of the goodies are on the accompanying, region-locked Blu, and include an hour spent with Mike Hodges, almost 20-mins. discussing Budd’s score with Jonny Trunk, and several vintage goodies showcasing Budd and the location work. But these are just kick-starters. We spend almost a half-hour with co-star, Petra Markham and another half-hour with Tony Klinger – the son of Get Carter’s producer, Michael Klinger. There’s also Philip Trevelyan's 1967 half-hour tribute to the pub on the banks of the River Tyne featured in the movie, plus international/reissue trailers, and premiere footage, all totaling less than a minute each. If you were fortunate enough to snatch up one of the 10,000 limited edition collector’s copies, there was also an 80-page book, a double-sided poster, and four lobby cards to be had. Bottom line: the BFI 4K of Get Carter easily outclasses Warner Home Video’s Blu and is the preferred viewing experience for this memorable British crime saga.

FILM RATING (out of 5 – 5 being the best)

4

VIDEO/AUDIO

Warner Blu – 3.5

BFI 4K – 5+

EXTRAS

Warner Blu – 1

BFI 4K – 5+