User Reviews

The demise of the Production Code gave first-time director Mike Hodges the freedom to make this British gangster movie in a more realistic style than would ever have been possible before and the result was a gritty and uncompromising end-product that proved to be both groundbreaking and highly influential. Based on Ted Lewis' novel "Jack Returns Home", it's the tale of one man's quest for revenge and features some great location work, considerable amounts of brutality and a cast of pretty unsavoury characters. The mood of the piece is grim throughout and the action includes a number of well-staged sequences that, for various reasons, prove to be very memorable.

Jack Carter (Michael Caine), who works as an enforcer for London gangsters, the Fletcher brothers, travels to Newcastle-upon-Tyne to attend the funeral of his brother who had reportedly been killed in a car accident whilst drunk. After failing to gather any more information from Frank's daughter Doreen (Petra Markham) or his mistress, Margaret (Dorothy White), Jack goes to the local racecourse where he meets one of his old contacts, a chauffeur called Eric Paice (Ian Hendry) who proves to be very unhelpful. However, after discovering that Eric works for local crime boss Cyril Kinnear (John Osbourne), Jack goes to visit the ultra-smooth villain at his mansion where he encounters a porn star called Glenda (Geraldine Moffatt) and the same kind of reticence about Frank's death that he'd come up against elsewhere.

At the "bed and breakfast" lodgings where Jack is staying, he gets visited by some heavies who tell him to leave Newcastle and after an altercation, is told that they were hired by local businessman Cliff Brumby (Bryan Mosely). This proves to be false information and a little while later, a couple of thugs working for the Fletcher brothers call by with the intention of taking Jack back to London. The two men decide to leave promptly, however, when Jack threatens them with a shotgun but turn up again at a different location when Jack's in the middle of a conversation with the uncooperative Margaret. On this occasion, Jack makes a rapid escape and the chase that follows ends well for him when Glenda picks him up in her sports car and drives him at great speed to meet Brumby on the top floor of a multi-storey car park.

The information that Brumby discloses at this point enables Jack to start unravelling the mystery of what had happened to Frank an provides the catalyst for the series of killings that follow.

"Get Carter" contains a number of memorable scenes such as the one in which Brumby is thrown off the top of a multi-storey car park, the sequences during which Jack and his landlady are interrupted in flagrante delicto and the powerful finale. Overall, there's an unremitting bleakness that permeates all the action and is well complemented by some of the grim-looking outside locations and the action that takes place in the drab bingo hall, a smoke-filled pub and the grubby betting shop.

Jack Carter returned to his hometown to avenge the death of his brother despite the fact that he never liked Frank and knew that the Fletchers and the Newcastle mob both disapproved of his actions because of the threat he posed to the smooth running of their businesses. Michael Caine, in a very controlled performance, shows convincingly how driven, callous and ruthless Jack is and also how abusive he is in his relationships with a series of women. The quality of the supporting cast is also very impressive with very solid contributions from everyone involved.

Michael Caine deserves all the plaudits he has received for this film. He shoulders the burden of the story with ease (there are very few scenes where he doesn't appear). His Jack Carter is calculating and uncaring, happy to murder or cause hurt to anyone who stands in his way – even if, as the cases of Keith, Glenda or Albert, he knows they are innocent. His dead eyes reveal a cold spirit, and you never for a moment feel that he's morally superior to any of the other characters. You're not even sure whether his quest to find his brother's killer is prompted by fraternal revenge or by simple rebelliousness against those telling him to pack it in and go home. There's no attempt (thankfully) to humanise him or find "reasons" for his criminality, as in so many poorer pictures. And yet you're carried along with Carter, fascinated by his destruction of the Newcastle criminal infrastructure.

We see the different faces of gangsterism close up. The violence, the amorality, the sexism we've seen in countless other films. But here we also see in detail the many quirks that we know real gangsters are prone to: cleanliness fetish (Carter obsessively polishing his British Rail spoon), hypochondria (Carter's apparently useless nose drops and pills), cruelty (Carter taunting his frustrated landlady in the famous phone sex scene), sentimentality (Carter crying at the Teacher's Pet porn film, while having demonstrated little interest in his niece – or possibly daughter – Doreen), callousness (his lack of compassion towards Keith after he is beaten up), fussiness (wanting his beer in a tall glass not a mug), foolish bravado (Carter walking naked into a street full of marching band members, carrying his shotgun), and untrustworthiness (Carter and Kinnear make a deal, selling out a fellow villain, then right away doublecross each other.) Then there's the chilling sight of Eric Paice's terrified eyes when Carter pulls off his shades – many a real-life gangster would understand that.

Each time I see this film, and I've seen it probably two dozen times – I'm always taken by the clarity of the narrative, by the well rounded characters (even those in bit parts), by the haunting Roy Budd score. But it needs to be said that, to the film's benefit, a number of unusual risks have been taken. For instance, the depiction of the characters benefits from offbeat casting. Glenda (Geraldine Moffat), Edna (Rosemary Dunham), Doreen (Petra Markham), Peter (Tony Beckley) and other well chosen actors fit their parts perfectly. Caine makes no attempt to hide his grown up, pale, lumpy body even when naked. The violence is not gratuitous, but when it appears we are shown its shocking effects full on. Plus, it also must have taken some courage to set the film in Newcastle – not usually first choice as a location for major films – which here, largely owing to the excellent Wolfgang Suschitsky photography, becomes a character in its own right.

"Get Carter" is a very nasty film. The language is rough, there's a lot of nudity and there are lots of naked folks. It is NOT a good film to watch with your kids, mother-in-law or Father Jenkins! However, if you don't mind all the sleazy nastiness, it IS awfully entertaining.

The film begins in London. Carter (Michael Caine) is being advised by his mobster friends to stay away from his brother's funeral in Newcastle. However, Carter is determined to go--and determined to learn how his brother died and who is responsible. For the rest of the movie, Carter mucks about Newcastle--hanging about low-lifes and kicking butt. Carter is violent, remorseless and unstoppable in his quest. At first, you have no empathy for the man--after all, he is a brutal mobster. However, when you learn exactly why the brother was killed, you begin to root for Carter. See the film and you'll see what I mean.

This is a very stylish and well made film. Not a lot of plot, but highly entertaining and Caine does a dandy job. Well worth seeing.

"Get Carter" is often said to have inspired the current crop of British gangster films. If this is the case, Guy Ritchie et al must have well and truly got the wrong end of the stick. I haven't actually seen "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels" or any of the "Right Royal Cockney Barrel O'Monkeys" type films which followed it, but I get the impression that these are merely dumb entertainment for "new" lads. In contrast, "Get Carter" is unremittingly bleak. If Samuel Beckett wrote a gangster film, it might come out something like this. The grim Newcastle locations add to an atmosphere of decay and despair. The naturalistic camera work avoids cliches and adds effectively to the atmosphere. Long, static shots give the impression of actually being present as a bewildered bystander as the gangsters go about their "business". Although the long tracking shots of people walking/running are almost pythonesque at times, this only serves to emphasise the down to earth realism of the film. After all, even violent gangsters have to go through banal routines such as walking down the street. The score is minimalist but very effective, in contrast to the modern British films which seem to be conceived as a gravy train for music publishers and second rate "indie" bands.

There are few, if any, sympathetic characters. Jack Carter, the central character, is not at all pleasant or heroic. The only people for whom he shows any affection are Frank and Doreen, and he is unable to express this affection except through money and violence. Keith thinks he is Carter's friend, but when he is let down and beaten up he realises that he is being used. Carter does not appear to love Anna, and it is not certain whether she really loves him, although there is a genuine sexual attraction between them. Carter belongs to a misogynistic and hypocritical culture which the film scathingly exposes. The only scene in which he shows any genuine emotion is when he discovers a porn film featuring his niece, Doreen. The cruel irony is that in the opening scene, he was seen looking at dirty pictures with his cronies, and his disgust must be partly directed at himself even though he refuses to acknowledge it. He then expresses his shock and outrage by going straight upstairs to assault and humiliate the nearest woman! And she just happens to have appeared in the very same film as Doreen: a clear case of men projecting their own sexual guilt onto women. The makers of the film cannot have been unaware of the implications of this sexual hypocrisy. The scenes are deliberately juxtaposed to emphasise Carter's ambivalence and double standards.

The certainties of a linear narrative have been bravely eschewed. Carter is only able to react to events which are beyond his control and is sometimes led up blind alleys, taking a long time to realise what is really going on. This, again, is realism at its best. Real life does not have a coherent plot and nobody has complete control over their own life. Carter's lack of control is a central theme of the film. He likes to think that he is big, hard and clever, but his acts of revenge are ultimately pointless. Like Frank Machin in "This Sporting Life", he is emotionally shallow and able to express himself only through futile acts of aggression. He is cruelly exposed in the final scene as the smile is wiped off his face, the closing shot of the sea emphasising man's powerlessness.

The film also contains elements of social comment and class politics. Frank is portrayed as a decent, honest, "salt of the earth" working class type, while the slimy and sinister Kinnear has a chauffeur and lives in a big house in the country where he hosts decadent orgies. These themes come to the fore in the (often overlooked) funeral scene. As Frank's small cortege pulls through the gates of the crematorium, we see an endless stream of cars leaving from the previous funeral. The message is that the "liberation" of the 60s brought few practical benefits for working class people in the north of England. Again, this relates to the dominant theme of control, or lack of it. The "swinging 60s" are exposed as a dead end of pointless hedonism. The extent of women's liberation is also questioned. "Get Carter" portrays a society in which women are not at all liberated except in a few superficial ways. The female characters in the film are all victims, owned and used by men who see them as sex objects and little more. It is implied that the sexual freedom brought by the contraceptive pill has benefited men more than women.

It's not all angst and depression though. There is some good fighting, swearing, shooting and dangerous driving. There are also many subtle touches of black humour. Nevertheless, this is not a mindless action film. The consequences of violence are never ignored or glossed over. We are shown Keith lying on his bed in agony after getting a severe beating, leaving us in no doubt that his brief flirtation with gangsters has ruined his life.

"Get Carter" is a masterpiece, although it will not be to everyone's taste. If you want non-stop action, try a mindless Arnold Schwarzeneger film. There is nothing for you here. However, if you are prepared to approach "Get Carter" with an open mind and think about it rather than be a passive observer demanding to be entertained, you will find a rewarding work of art with hidden depths. Forget Guy Ritchie. The only worthy successor of "Get Carter" is Neil Jordan's "Mona Lisa", which addresses similar themes and is equally bleak and disturbing.

I am somewhat mystified by the reputation of Get Carter as a cult classic. To me, this is a portrait of revenge and the self-destructive effect that it has upon the perpetrator, who basically transmogrifies into his enemy by deigning to conduct himself as he did--and worse.

In this case, the angry Carter seeks to avenge his brother's murder, but ends up whacking everyone and his sister, girlfriend, and other random associates along the way. Pretty unsettling and more a statement of the killer's deranged mental state than anything else. Near the end, he was even starting to resemble Henry Lee Lucas a bit.

"He who lives by the gun dies by the gun" is essentially the moral of this story. Or, if you like: "What goes around comes around," or perhaps "violence breeds violence." There was nothing noble whatsoever in this killing spree. I do aver that Michael Caine did a pretty good job in the role of someone suffering from serious, big-time OCD with a major idée fixe expressed only in the medium of yet more homicide. Too bad he wasn't a poet instead.

This is a gangster movie which takes the central figure-hardly the hero, because Carter (Michael Cane) is a brutal racketeer-out of the confines of Soho and away up north to the gangland of Newcastle-upon-Tyne...

The plot concerns Carter's efforts to discover who was responsible for the death of his brother... Against the wished of his London gang-boss he takes the train to Newcastle, and embarks upon a single-handed crusade of violence against the north-country gangsters...

"Get Carter" is a film which, in its way, is as ruthless as Don Siegel's 'Dirty Harry.' Carter is not a likable character... He is a perplexing lead character whom we never grow to care about, or even understand... He just happened to be a crook and a murderer pursuing his own private vendetta...

Memorable scenes include Caine with a shotgun ejecting a couple of thugs from his bed-and-breakfast; the car going into the docks with an unnoticed passenger in the trunk; and a mob boss taking a dive from a multi-story parking garage...

My original interpretation of the cinematographer/director's style was that it was placing the camera in the position of someone spying on the scene. I think the word "spy" though is wrong. It is the position of a voyeur.

The rough, hand-held style relied on a "foreground obstruction" aesthetic, too -- the motion of the camera and the intervening objects/people divided our attention between

the story as an objective thing, and made me at least feel as though we are seeing found footage from a documentary that is asking us to form an opinion from a mass of distracting elements.

Later, the obstructions, distractions, and extras change from being incidental to the story to becoming central to the story.

I got the sense right away that Jack Carter had come home to figure out what happened to his brother. He clearly didn't buy the drunk driving accident myth. And yet Jack shaving over his brother's coffin (showing no respect) and then his covering his brother's face (showing respect) communicates ambiguity about Jack's character. Is he an anti-hero taking on a moral vendetta, standing in for any of us who have seen or been victim to injustice? Or is he something else?

The sex started out as fun, and the women were beautiful. The way it was shot (the rocking chair scene, for example) used women in the foreground (or, Britt's legs in the foreground) to bring them forward in our awareness without them being the main plane of focus (either Jack on the phone or Britt's beautiful and erotic face). The rocking chair evoked the sounds and rhythms of sex but was absurdly quirky - a real point of humor, I think, but the beginning of how the director starts to blend sex, violence and humor.

We also see at the end of the rocking horse scene that the phone sex was not with Jack's monogamous partner, but that he was deeply in the erotic imagination of a woman attached to another man, and he was forcefully and unapologetically going to exploit his position there.

Even though what we learn about Jack in the rocking chair scene by itself happens to thousands or millions of people, in the context of the shaving scene and his penchant for paying people to do his bidding (at their risk) or to non-apologize apologize, we begin to see him as emotionally ill or detached. Not just an anti-hero.

Also early in the movie when there is a sex scene, before the audience gets a chance to let their heart slow down, bad guys show up to menace Jack - with the timing of the arrival of bad guys quickly converging precisely on the moment of intercourse.

Jack confidently wields a large gun and forces bad guys onto the street, following after them with no compunction, is funny ... but at the same time showing something menacing about Jack. A lack of shame becomes somehow foreshadowing for a deep lack of morality or empathy.

So now we get to the question: Is he a psychopath? The cruel language he uses with women, his roughness with them, particularly in the beginning, could perhaps at the time be understood as a grieving brother amidst prostitutes who were hiding information about his brother's death. But from 2015 -- and from the perspective of what we learn about Jack by the end of the movie -- he was a misogynist. Indeed, the disturbing scene where he gives his ex-brother's lover/regular prostitute an overdose shows him as calculating and without any empathy.

It's interesting to me that the core moment when Jack learns the motivation for everyone's bad before -- seeing Doreen in a porn film -- he goes from enjoying the film to being devastated. This is precisely what I was going through. I loved the beautiful women in the film and was willing to suspend my critique of their characters for some cinematic pleasure. But as the characters were having sex, the director was presenting them to us as a voyeur. The director's style was voyeuristic, and he had successfully made me a voyeur as well.

That transition of the viewer's role is disturbing.

And Jack goes from that moment of "harmless" and pleasurable porn viewing and fantasy to a realization of the depth of exploitation involved.

The ending is covered in filth, waste, inhumanity. When Jack finally kills the man responsible for his brother's death, his grim, angry face doesn't just laugh, it cackles. Has he cracked? The article I linked to above makes that case, but I don't think so. That would imply he has, at that point, lost his moral code. I think he never had one. So the laugh, in my view, is instead a proof point: He is a psychopath.

And so, when he ultimately is shot in the head and lies in the filthy tide, I was shocked, but not, in the least, sad.

After the police show up at the mansion and pull all the partiers outside, the director presents them to us -- almost as a line-up. (He is cutting between this and other scenes).

These people, formerly drugged-up, naked, and otherwise debauched, looked like a cross-section of English society.

After a movie of being a voyeur looking at the dangerous world of gangster violence and sex, we now find ourselves looking at ... ourselves.

Get Carter is not a very good or even great film to be honest. It lacks narrative as well as character, and Caine's performance is shamefully dull and embarrassing. The aspect that really lets Get Carter down though is the fact that it's really slow moving and immensely bleak.

The direction is way below your normal action thriller because it's the other equations that bring the film down as a whole. The character's all seem over-confident and as mentioned before, dull. Nothing supports the cast or story because of how bad the direction is.

This film is so Seriously overrated that you would cry if you couldn't get a refund of your money or time.