FT MAGAZINE 
To cinema-goers used to the decadently exciting outlaws of Bonnie and Clyde and the lovable rogues of The Italian Job, Michael Caine’s portrayal of gangster Jack Carter came as a shock.
Set in the Newcastle underworld, the cold violence of Mike Hodges’ Get Carter startled audiences at the time, but the film has since been recognised as a landmark in the development of the modern gangster film. Hodges, who had worked on ITV’s hard-hitting current affairs programme World in Action in the 1960s, pitilessly showed the city as a world of back-to-back slums, sleazy pubs, pornography and municipal corruption.
The character of Carter, who travels to Newcastle after the suspicious death of his brother, reflected a Britain of union unrest, brutalist high rises and social division. He was taciturn, nihilistic and capable of savagery delivered with no discernible emotion. When the film was released on March 10 1971, many critics disliked it; George Melly said that watching Carter’s murderous rampage was akin to “a bottle of neat gin swallowed before breakfast”.
Re-evaluation came gradually. The critic Alexander Walker, writing in 1985, praised the film for its depiction of “a society self-destructively bent on inflicting the maximum damage on its own democratic organs”. In 1993 Quentin Tarantino said it was his favourite British film, and the poster advertising Guy Ritchie’s 1998 gangster movie Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels paid homage, with Vinnie Jones brandishing a shotgun in an echo of Caine in the Get Carter publicity shots.
Even so, directors such as Ritchie and Tarantino show little of the mundane violence seen in Get Carter. For its success in capturing a more sordid version of underworld crime, and one where the moral compass utterly fails to settle, Get Carter, nearly four decades on, still stands alone.
