How Get Carter dis­pelled the myth of the British gangster

British gang­sters were ​“stu­pid, sil­ly, or fun­ny.” This was Michael Caine’s impres­sion of crime films from the 1950s and ​’60s, and it was a myth he felt keen to dis­pel. Hav­ing grown up among hard­ened crim­i­nals in London’s Ele­phant and Cas­tle, he knew the real­i­ty was more sin­is­ter. The prob­lem, Caine felt, was that most domes­tic gang­ster pic­tures were made by ​“bour­geois” film­mak­ers with ​“no idea” what it was like to live with such characters.

It was this desire to set the record straight that attract­ed Caine to a screen­play by up-and-com­ing tele­vi­sion direc­tor Mike Hodges, adapt­ed from Ted Lewis’ pulp noir nov­el ​‘Jack’s Return Home’. This was to be a new breed of British crime film, lay­ing bare the nas­ti­ness and moral decay at the root of organ­ised crime. Get Carter, as it was even­tu­al­ly titled, duly came to rede­fine the British gang­ster on screen, and 50 years on it remains a thrilling and scan­dalous exposé of the crim­i­nal underworld.

Caine illus­trat­ed his belief in the project by sign­ing on as co-pro­duc­er – a bold move for one of the most bank­able stars in the coun­try. Indeed, Get Carter proved to be a water­shed in Caine’s career as much as it was for the pop­u­lar per­cep­tion of the British gang­ster. The epony­mous Jack Carter, a vicious and irre­deemable hood­lum, is entire­ly divorced from the lov­able rogues Caine was best known for play­ing. Although his slick tai­lor­ing and Roy Budd’s emi­nent­ly hum­ma­ble theme music might ini­tial­ly sug­gest a glam­orous anti­hero along the lines of The Ital­ian Job’s Char­lie Cro­ker, the grim real­i­ty of Carter’s world quick­ly, and shock­ing­ly, dis­abus­es this notion.

The insou­ciance with which Carter metes out pun­ish­ment – par­tic­u­lar­ly against women – is a chill­ing sub­ver­sion of Caine’s usu­al affa­bil­i­ty. A shad­ow of cal­lous malev­o­lence hangs over his dom­i­neer­ing pres­ence and a sub­tle men­ace per­vades his every action, even a ges­ture as innocu­ous as order­ing a pint of bit­ter ​“in a thin glass”. Although ini­tial­ly defined by a con­trolled and self-con­fi­dent façade, Carter’s com­po­sure slow­ly cracks to reveal a psy­chot­ic rage beneath, and the body count ris­es accordingly.

It’s not just the causal bru­tal­i­ty of Get Carter which sets it apart, but the seed­i­ness of the world it depicts. The plot deals in child sex­u­al abuse, hard drugs and ille­gal pornog­ra­phy, all of which were sub­ject to a wider moral pan­ic in ​’70s Britain. Although not an overt­ly polit­i­cal film, Get Carter infers a con­nec­tion between these depraved crim­i­nal ele­ments and the pover­ty of work­ing-class com­mu­ni­ties from which they emerge. To this end, Hodges said that the depri­va­tion of post­war New­cas­tle was ​“inte­gral” to Carter’s char­ac­ter, and even sug­gest­ed that this vein of social com­men­tary may have con­tributed to the film’s luke­warm crit­i­cal recep­tion: ​“We were show­ing a side of Britain that peo­ple didn’t want.”

The film’s strik­ing use of real loca­tions from across New­cas­tle-Upon-Tyne and the sur­round­ing area is cru­cial to its sense of authen­tic­i­ty. A dis­or­gan­ised mix of Vic­to­ri­an and mid-cen­tu­ry Bru­tal­ist archi­tec­ture sits along­side indus­tri­al decay, pro­vid­ing a sin­gu­lar back­drop which appears to reflect the moral degra­da­tion of the con­tem­po­rary gang­ster. Many of the land­marks fea­tured have long since been lost to rede­vel­op­ment and dein­dus­tri­al­i­sa­tion, leav­ing some sequences with the melan­cholic qual­i­ty of a time capsule.

Hodges’ empha­sis on loca­tion was influ­enced by his back­ground in doc­u­men­tary, as was his predilec­tion for shoot­ing with long focal length lens­es. Their dis­tinc­tive mag­ni­fy­ing effect imbues Wolf­gang Suschitzky’s cin­e­matog­ra­phy with a rich depth, fram­ing the hushed con­ver­sa­tions and unspo­ken threats between Newcastle’s crim­i­nal fra­ter­ni­ty with a clan­des­tine and some­what voyeuris­tic eye. It’s a nat­u­ral­is­tic aes­thet­ic which brings to mind the ciné­ma vérité of con­ti­nen­tal doc­u­men­tar­i­ans – or, per­haps more appro­pri­ate­ly, police sur­veil­lance footage.

Get Carter wears its for­eign influ­ences on its sleeve. The Ray­mond Chan­dler nov­el which Carter reads dur­ing the title sequence pays homage to Amer­i­can film noir cin­e­ma of the ​’40s, while Hodges’ inven­tive use of mon­tage edit­ing in cer­tain sequences is evoca­tive of the French New Wave. Yet it’s the social real­ism of the British New Wave to which Get Carter owes its great­est debt – only this time the angry young man wears a three-piece suit and car­ries a shotgun.

Draw­ing from a vari­ety of influ­ences and adding a dol­lop of ear­ly ​’70s cyn­i­cism for good mea­sure, Get Carter was a ground­break­ing moment in British cin­e­ma. With an unflinch­ing­ly cru­el gaze, the film recast the famil­iar­ly ami­able cock­ney gang­ster as an unscrupu­lous vil­lain and tied his wicked­ness to a deep­er soci­etal ill­ness. The grit­ty British crime film has since become a cin­e­mat­ic sta­ple, from John Mackenzie’s The Long Good Fri­day to Guy Ritchie’s var­i­ous con­tri­bu­tions. But all live in the shad­ow of Jack Carter.