Get Carter

[Timmy_Lea]

The more I see of Hodges output, the more Get Carter looks like a fluke.

Nah, he's a very good director. I'll Sleep When I'm Dead is an overlooked modern British classic.

[GRAEME]

Nah, he's a very good director. I'll Sleep When I'm Dead is an overlooked modern British classic.

Nah yourself - Flash Gordon!



He is, to put it mildly, variable in the extreme...

[stefmcd]

The Carter books, by Ted Lewis, are superbly written. I think there are about 5 of them. Obviously the movie prevented the possibility of a sequel. I found when I read them I was easily able to picture Caine in the other stories so, in some ways, you can get the other 4 as films (if only in ur head!)

[stefmcd]

The more I see of Hodges output, the more Get Carter looks like a fluke.

Croupier, starring Clive Owen, is another fine Hodges movie.

:-)

[McGill]

I was in Newcastle on the 26th July this year & as the train I was travelling on was leaving the station I saw that the car park was being demolished, presumably it's completely gone by now.

[GRAEME]

I was in Newcastle on the 26th July this year & as the train I was travelling on was leaving the station I saw that the car park was being demolished, presumably it's completely gone by now.

We we walked past the thing on 12th August - half demolished but the "nightclub" was still there! It was visible from our hotel bedroom window on the Quayside.



Any further updates?

[McGill]

Interesting that of the comments made about the car park, the favourable was from outside Gateshead and the one's who detested it were from locals.

[faginsgirl]

From the Get Carter talk at Gateshead library.



`Get Carter`, now celebrating its 40th anniversary, was Mike Hodges first feature film and it took eight months to make. It is based on the book by Ted Lewis about the life of Jack Carter.

The film was originally going to be made in Hull but after visiting Newcastle Hodges decided that it would be the ideal setting.

The actor John Bindon, who played the younger Fletcher brother went to prison for committing an actual gangland murder in the 1970s.

In 1978, Bindon became involved in a fight with John Darke, a London gangster,[1] outside the Ranelagh Yacht Club, in Fulham, London. Darke was stabbed nine times, resulting in his death, and Bindon managed to flee to Dublin with his own knife wounds covered up. He gave himself up to police and in the subsequent trial at the Old Bailey in November 1979. The prosecution claimed that this was a £10,000 contract killing[1] over drugs, with the fight as a cover for the death. However, the defence argued that Darke's death was in self-defence, saying Bindon was in fear of his life as he was being blackmailed about losing drug money and cocaine worth thousands of pounds (though his defence might have been hindered amid allegations of bragging to a cellmate that he was a hitman while on remand awaiting trial). Bindon was acquitted of Darke's murder. It was reported that the "substantial appearance" of actor Bob Hoskins as a character witness at the trial helped sway the jury's verdict[1] and that the judge Sir William Mars-Jones "had been sympathetic towards Bindon in his summing-up and unhappy with the ragbag of witnesses produced by the prosecution".[7]

Media reports of the trial, along with the Oakland incident, seriously damaged Bindon's reputation (there were other various allegations of a similar violent nature against Bindon) and he never worked in the entertainment industry again. This was partly attributable also to his reputation for being difficult to work with on set, as much as his alleged connections to organised crime.

The people of the North east are proud of their Get Carter heritage and just before the house where the character Brumby lived was pulled down, there was a protest, as with the `Trinity Square` car park.

In the book Brumby does not die, unlike in the film.

The `down steps` chase scenes were filmed at Newcastle quay side and the area remains untouched today. (I know `cos I got lost down there last year!).

The final scene was filmed at Easington in the North east.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[GRAEME]

Croupier, starring Clive Owen, is another fine Hodges movie.

:-)

No. It's dull.

And then there is Morons From Outer Space!

A greater argument against auteur theory I can not imagine...

[Mustard Pies]

Apparently they're doing a special visit to all the location areas of Get Carter. It was on the local TV news.

You get to see the film at a local cinema, then you're off on the bus on a trip to the location areas. I was all ready, pen and paper in hand, waiting for the details. But the dunce reporter didn't say which cinema or when it was happening.

Dopes. :mad:

[captainhaddock]

john craven has a good anecdote of his time as a reporter interviewing michael caine onset in a repeat of rewind the 60s shown this afternoon on bbc2

it certainly changes the perspective of the in a thin glass scene

[Steve Crook]

Apparently they're doing a special visit to all the location areas of Get Carter. It was on the local TV news.

You get to see the film at a local cinema, then you're off on the bus on a trip to the location areas. I was all ready, pen and paper in hand, waiting for the details. But the dunce reporter didn't say which cinema or when it was happening.

Dopes. :mad:

Contact the local TV news

Steve

[Freddy]

Get Carter - unused design by Bill Gold is featured in
Bill Gold: PosterWorks. — with Michael Caine and Bill Gold.

[Rowdon]

Get Carter - unused design by Bill Gold is featured in
Bill Gold: PosterWorks. — with Michael Caine and Bill Gold.

i like the image ... but what does it mean? He can shoot people and recover from an operation better than anybody? Shoot people while recovering from an operation?

[Freddy]

If it was a dining table and not a bed it would be 'Eat Shoots and Leaves' .

[Steve Crook]

i like the image ... but what does it mean? He can shoot people and recover from an operation better than anybody? Shoot people while recovering from an operation?

Probably why they didn't use it

It's also the wrong gun. He used a shotgun not a sniper rifle. The rifle was used by someone else

Steve

[cassidy]

No, it actually means that he shoots people who can't make the bed to his satisfaction !!

i like the image ... but what does it mean? He can shoot people and recover from an operation better than anybody? Shoot people while recovering from an operation?

[arunachula]

The faces and the locations around Newcastle are indeed the real sixties and seventies - and they're long gone now. For a southerner like me, it was indeed another country. As it must have been for Jack.

[didi-5]

One of the most iconic crime films of the 1970s, and it's British - I haven't seen the original 'Get Carter' for around four years now but after reading through this thread I wanted to share my thoughts about it.

I agree with those who say this film is not a vigilante film, or one about revenge per se. It isn't 'Death Wish'. It is a low-life heading north to rub out other low-lifes who in turn have exploited his niece and killed his brother. It's vicious, seedy, exploitative, and grubby.

Never has the North East of England been shown in such bleakness, or the scum who populate its fringes of crime been shown in such a realistic way. And yet, with all this, we can see from the posters promoting the film that it is full of iconic imagery and, in a way, glamour. Guns are good, and all that. Jack Carter is presented as who men want to be and who women want to be with, and so starts a cliche which has carried forward to every similar film since, as well as nodding back to a far more glossy Hollywood past.

However, in casting Michael Caine in the lead role something has happened to the character of Carter. It is a good performance, but it is also a star performance. Mike Hodges famously wanted Ian Hendry for the role and in fact it was more or less set before the funding powers wanted a bigger name, 'Harry Palmer' no less. In Hodges' original take on the role, Carter was even seedier and with less redeeming features than the star performance put forward by Caine gave him - I think casting Caine was a good money move, but I'm intrigued by the alternatives. I'm not particularly a Caine fan as in most films he essentially plays himself, and, although we can value and enjoy, in a perverse way, the obvious mutual animosity between him and Hendry in their roles as filmed (Hendry moving to the secondary role of the chauffeur in 70s cool shades, who of course doesn't make it to the finale), we can also wonder about how Get Carter would have turned out had Caine been taken out of the equation and the distraction of a star name with associated baggage removed.

From a female perspective, I feel uncomfortable about the objectification of women within this film - Britt Ekland is in a way just as abused by Carter as the niece who performs in the porn film has been by his brother's associates. And in watching that film, and then recognising the girl, Carter might just show emotion and feeling because of her situation - but he is also happy to pay to watch films like this without a thought to the criminal backstory and enslavement that might be blighting the girls who are involved. You can see some parallels with George C Scott's role in 'Hardcore' where he sees a skin flick featuring his daughter, and searches for revenge. His reasoning is sound, and convincing, but Jack Carter is not a nice chap, and it becomes clear than although in theory his motivation is to avenge the murder of his brother Frank and the abuse of his niece, he actually gets a kick out of the act of killing and torturing other people, and the power he has over them. And because of this the film ends in the only way it can - the clue, perhaps, in the film's title 'Get' Carter, not simply Carter or Carter Is His Name. Someone or something is out to get him from the start. It's an involved game, a sick game, a trap, signed early on by the passenger he travels with, who will be of great importance later. The books went on to give Jack Carter another life, but Caine's Carter has to come to a dead end, as he does, in that bleak location, with blood on his hands.

I don't believe this film could have been made anywhere other than in Britain, and this is underlined by the US remake which was both ridiculous and unnecessarily offensive. The original was dark, and bleak, and washed out, and no one in it really deserves to live, they are so damaged, evil, and revolting - but it is not an offensive film. It is tainted a bit, perhaps, by the real-life criminal exploits of John Bindon, who features in the film, and in some ways by its place in the Caine mythology. In its publicity at least it glorifies the pursuit of violence as something to aspire to, and - that ending aside - rewards Carter for being as bad as those he pursues with such coldness. He's a character with no soul, which is why it works, IMO. It would become Caine's defining role throughout the 1970s, until his appearance in Educating Rita reminded people of the other types of material he could do with good writing and direction.