Get Carter (Brit noir)

 

Another movie post, because I’m still in the geosynchronous orbit of Tarantino’s brain candy, Cinema Speculation.

Brit noir hit its stride in the immediate postwar years, just as American film noir did, but the Brits had an extra serving of world-weary.  American tough-guy pictures in the late 1940’s laid on the cynicism and corruption, with no small helping of conspiracy and nuclear paranoia (Kiss Me Deadly took the atom bomb metaphor literally); the British style was more inward and furtive, and just plain creepy.  American noir was about lost innocence, Brit noir was about losing your soul. 

Carol Reed directed Odd Man Out in 1947, The Fallen Idol in ‘48, and The Third Man in ‘49, which is three for three.  Along about the same time, Brighton Rock, with a screenplay by Graham Greene and Terence Rattigan, made Richard Attenborough a star in his early twenties.  No Orchids for Miss Blandish – called “the most sickening exhibition of brutality, perversion, sex and sadism ever shown,” a review that only baits the hook - broke box office records. 

 

They were doing something right.  This was the period that saw David Lean’s two terrific Dickens adaptions, Great Expectations and Oliver Twist, and the heartbreaking Brief Encounter.  The famous and successful Ealing comedies, Kind Hearts and Coronets, Passport to Pimlico, and Whisky Galore! – released in the U.S. as Tight Little Island – all of them did well in the States.

Crime pictures seem to come in cycles.  Heist movies are always in fashion, for example, but after the late 1940’s, Brit noir took a sabbatical, and then came back with a roar in the early Sixties.  Stanley Baker in The Criminal (why was Stanley Baker never that big a star outside the UK?), a picture Joe Losey made after he was blacklisted and left the States.  The very strange and violent Never Let Go, with Peter Sellers as the psychotic heavy – Sellers later said he was channeling Rod Steiger, but didn’t mean it as a compliment.  All Night Long, Patrick McGoohan as Iago, in modern dress, a jazz drummer.  The Mark, Stuart Whitman an accused child molester; Night Must Fall, Albert Finney an axe murderer; and Victim, a ground-breaking noir, with Dirk Bogarde a gay lawyer who allows himself to be blackmailed. 

Not to mention the beginning of Bond, with Dr. No, and spy stories suddenly in vogue.  Again, the more kitchen-sink, hard-luck, wiseguy pictures took a back seat, glamorous and exotic was in. 

And then came the ‘70’s. 

Villain, Richard Burton in a remake of White Heat, all the gay subtext upfront and center – with Ian McShane, of all people, as Big Dick’s boytoy.  The way McShane tells the story, Richard told him, “You remind me of Elizabeth.”  McShane lets a beat go by, all innocence.  “I guess that made the kissing easier,” he says.  (Burton has to be seen to be believed, in Villain: the heavy gold jewelry, the paisley loungewear, open to his navel, the chest hair and the florid jowls, it’s a gay parody, pathetic and offensive and real as a dime, in its own crazy way.)

Which brings us to Get Carter, released in 1971.  First off, Michael Caine.  Introduced to major audiences in Zulu, he slipped effortlessly through the keyhole with The Ipcress File (not to be upstaged by seasoned pros like Gordon Jackson and the impeccably reptilian Nigel Green), and Alfie made him a bankable star.  The thing to remember about Michael Caine is that he was ours, it felt like he belonged to us, that cheeky attitude, and the accent.  For a generation of a Brit kids (not that I’m one), he turned the class system – where the way you speak is destiny – inside out.  He was a bloody Cockney, and he was suddenly the new archetype, much to his own surprise.  Secondly, the source material, a hard-boiled pulp novel by Ted Lewis called Jack’s Return Home, which rocketed to commercial success, and almost single-handedly established the Brit neo-noir.  Third, there was the director, Mike Hodges.  Carter was his debut feature, and truth be told, he’s never made another movie as crackling and acid.

The story’s a revenge tragedy.  Jack, the Michael Caine character, is muscle for the London mob.  His brother Frank is killed in a car crash, back home in Newcastle.  Jack travels up from the Smoke, to go to the funeral, and once he’s back, he smells a rat.  Somebody staged Frank’s murder to make it look like an accident.  Things go downhill from there, Jack being an agent of chaos, and by far the meanest bastard in a place seething with snakes.

Two things in particular stand out.  One is that Michael Caine plays Jack without any apparent emotional affect.  He isn’t simply remorseless; he has no sympathy for anybody.  I’d never seen anything like it, and certainly not from Michael Caine.  Almost always, a name actor will play to the audience, a nod and a wink, to show you the guy’s got a heart of gold under his gruff exterior.  (There’s a moment in Sharky’s Machine, where Burt Reynolds breaks character and goes all Aw, Shucks! on you, and almost blows the whole picture.  Burt, the director, shouldn’t have allowed Burt, the movie star, to pander.)  Caine is having none of it.  He doesn’t even pretend that Jack has an ounce of pity.  There’s one moment, late in the story, where Jack is watching a dirty movie, and recognizes who’s in it – I can’t tell you who, without giving it away – but his face is impassive, while his eyes leak tears.  Amazing bit, too.  In context, it shows you that Jack isn’t in control, that his stony mask has a fatal cost, but even so, the mask never really slips.  Jack has such a tight grip on himself, he can’t see he’s let his soul slip through his fingers.

The second thing is the visual affect of the picture, the way it’s shot.  The cinematographer said later his main contribution was the lighting and the exposures, and that it was director Mike Hodges who was responsible for the camera work, the shot setups and the look of the film.  (Which might remind you of Ridley Scott, on The Duellists, working as his own cameraman.)  The visual style, in Get Carter, is foreshortened and claustrophobic.  The movie starts with a zoom in, against the London skyline, at night, and ends with a zoom out, from a lonely shingle of beach.  In between, the tight zoom shots squash you up against the lens, shot from a distance, but pulled in close.  The whole picture has a Peeping Tom feel to it, and since a major plot point turns out to be pornography and sex traffic, it follows that the visual context is voyeuristic.  The sudden, savage violence has that same pornographic quality, that we’re watching, but more disturbing because it just boils up out of the earth, the random nature of the characters, bad luck and bad genes and bad choices.  You’re too close to look away.     

Get Carter cast a long shadow.  You see its influence.  It turned a corner, and afterwards you couldn’t go back.  Probably its most direct heir is The Long Good Friday, with that other Cockney, Bob Hoskins.  That’s another column.

The Sound of Bow Bells

I first saw Michael Caine in Zulu, but he didn’t stick, not like Nigel Green’s stern Color-Sergeant, or James Booth’s cheeky slacker, Pvt. Hook.  Caine had in fact auditioned to play Hook, but the director Cy Enfield cast him as the junior lieutenant, Bromhead.  Caine later said it was lucky Enfield was a Yank; a Brit director would never have cast him as an upper-class officer, not when his accent betrayed him as a Cockney lad.

 

Then in 1965, The Ipcress File was released.  Alfie, a year later, made him a name, and Shirley MacLaine hired him for Gambit.  Those three pictures essentially established him as a star, and established the character he so often played, insolent, a little below the salt, a striver with an ironic sensibility, and somehow detached from his own self-regard.  Ipcress, though, was the movie that put him front and center, at least for me personally, and he played Harry again in Funeral in Berlin and Billion-Dollar Brain.  Not quite a franchise like the Bond pictures, they seemed a good deal less calculated.

 

Bob Hoskins remarked that Caine basically opened the door for working-class stiffs.  Before him, you had to mimic the posh.  Roger Moore, who hailed from Lambeth, not far from Southwark, where Caine grew up, had to get rid of his speech patterns, which in Britain are destiny.  (The most famous Cockney to reinvent himself is of course Cary Grant, a character, a disguise, a second skin.)

 

The trick of Michael Caine is his natural authenticity, his transparency.  He’s not pretending to be anything but what he is, although acting is play.  Caine, like Bob Hoskins, is recognizably not Oxbridge, the Royal Shakespeare, or the soothing tones of the BBC.  His voice identifies him.

 

He’s got over sixty years in the business, but earlier on, in 1971, he made the movie that for me personifies him.   You can’t imagine anybody but Michael Caine playing Jack in Get Carter.

 

The movie is more nihilist than the Ted Lewis novel it’s based on, which is going some, because Ted Lewis could be as hardboiled as they come, but Get Carter is a particular kind of Brit noir.  You could cast back to Brighton Rock or Odd Man Out, or the truly odd Never Let Go – Peter Sellers as a psychotic gang boss – or look ahead to The Long Good Friday.  Richard Burton did Villain, a remake of White Heat, the same year Get Carter came out.  More recently, Essex Boys (2000), with Sean Bean, or Tom Hardy’s astonishing double turn as the Kray twins in Legend (2015).

What they have in common isn’t the psycho business, so much, or scorn for convention, but the attitude that conventions are irrelevant.  The suckers, the punters, play by the rules; apex predators could care less.

 

Get Carter has a deceptively simple premise.  A legbreaker for the London mob goes back home to Newcastle for his brother’s funeral.  They haven’t actually spoken for years, but when Jack realizes his brother’s death wasn’t an accident, the cover story unravels, and everything that follows has a Greek inevitability.  Caine plays Jack with an icy fury, glacial and retributive.  He says he based the character on the dead-end he might himself have become, a ghost of his own childhood environment.  Jack is utterly existential, shown by his actions, never reflective.  The most startling scene, for my money, after repeated and grueling violence, comes late in the movie, when Jack is watching a pornographic film clip – the contents of which I can’t reveal – and while his face is still and empty of emotion, he’s leaking tears.  The character is clearly, and fatally, compromised. 

 

Get Carter was the director Mike Hodges’ first feature, and he wrote the screenplay.  The cinematographer was Wolfgang Suschitzky, who says he waited for the light, and set the exposure.  The rest is Hodges.  This is generous of him to say, because the look of Get Carter is very specific.  It begins with a slow zoom in, to the lit upper floor of a dark London highrise, and ends with a slow zoom out, from a deserted Newcastle beach.  In between, most of it seems to be shot in tight zoom.  Not a moving lens, but already cranked in tight, so the perspective is flattened, and any peripheral background is cut off.  This has the effect of squashing the movie in your face, so it’s voyeuristic, and claustrophobic.  And because the violence is seen both at a remove, but intimately, by the camera, it’s pornographic. 

 

This is a clear esthetic choice.  The shooting method reflects the movie’s objective content.  Pornography is the story hook, and a visual correlative.

We will, in charity, pass over the painful remakes.  The original is the one to see, and in a very real sense, it’s sui generis.  You can’t do better.  This is Michael Caine epitomized; this is visceral, committed movie-making, as if the fate of the human condition depended on it.