#get carter

A strange side effect of the Cool Britannia wave of late ’95 until 2000 was the re-appraisal by a younger (back then) generation of mod culture and early 70s films. It’s fascinating that Michael Caine ended the 60s with The Italian Job, a “relax, it’s just a flick” affair that is stylish, fun, and entirely unbelievable and switched gears in the 70s with the downbeat Too late the hero and the…

Get Carter

4/5

Brutal British crime movie that set the tone for all further entries. Carter is investigating his brother’s death, but it’s obvious who did it. What the small-town thugs don’t know is that he’s just gathering a list of victims for torture and vengeance. The use of cross-cut editing is very good, like the scene where a sex scene plays in tandem with the woman using a gear shift. Michael Caine is fantastic and we’ve seen him either play this archetype or against this archetype many times more.

I need to rewatch get carter and go and write an essay on letterboxd on it bc i will never shut up abt it genuinely and its so ahead of its time arghhhh (also michael caine is so hot idc look at him in his sexy suit with his sexy gun) go watch it!!!

Today Get Carter is considered one of Britain’s greatest films, certainly its finest crime drama. 1971 audiences reacted to its gritty violence with shock and disgust. Director Mike Hodges’ vision was unleavened by the wisecracking wit of Dirty Harry or the stylized ultraviolence of A Clockwork Orange or The Wild Bunch. Set amidst the smoldering scrap heaps and dive bars of Newcastle, Get Carter looked like it was filmed in a dirty ashtray.

Get Carter is lauded as a Very Important Movie. Ted Lewis, the author of Jack’s Return Home and two subsequent Jack Carter prequels, is less widely remembered. Yet Lewis’s novels reveal more clearly that what many viewers still mistake for celebratory nihilism is in fact a parable that is as ordered and moral as a Greek tragedy. https://www.notesfromtheendofti.me/p/how-to-get-carter