Get Carter: 55 Years On
Featuring Michael Caine's best-ever performance, Mike Hodges's brutal revenge thriller is still riveting
Warning: Contains spoilers
My most vivid memory of seeing gritty gangster thriller Get Carter (1971) is from a rerelease screening at the cinema in the late 1990s. Around then, I’d inadvertently started a peculiar habit of seeing films in the cities in which they are set. Shadowlands (1993) in Oxford, for instance. In the case of Get Carter, I saw the film at the Tyneside Cinema in Newcastle. By then, much of the city and surrounding area no longer resembled the grim-up-north locations that gave this its dirt-under-the-fingernails power. Unlike Oxford in Shadowlands, much of Newcastle had been transformed.
As far as I’m concerned, Get Carter is the greatest film about the futility of vengeance ever made. That’s distinct from the greatest revenge film, with the latter granting the audience a cathartic celebration of violent justice, and the former critiquing it. Bleakness oozes from every frame in Mike Hodges’s directorial debut, an adaptation of Ted Lewis’s 1970 novel, Jack’s Return Home. The titular Jack Carter is played with uncompromising brutality by Michael Caine, in what remains, in my view, his finest ever performance.
