Ian Hendry – Movie Musings

Brutal, dark and nihilistic British gangster film removes any chance that you might fancy trying a life of crime

Director: Mike Hodges

Cast: Michael Caine (Jack Carter), Ian Hendry (Eric), John Osborne (Kinnear), Britt Ekland (Anna), Brian Mosley (Cliff Brumby), George Sewell (Con McCarty), Tony Beckley (Peter the Dutchman), Glynn Edwards (Albert Swift), Alun Armstrong (Keith), Bernard Hepton (Thorpe), Petra Markham (Doreen), Geraldine Moffat (Glenda), Dorothy White (Margaret)

It’s probably the finest British gangster film ever made. Get Carter is a cold, dark, grimy film – a punch to the solar plexus, which completely rejects any sense of charm in its gangster characters. Michael Caine called Jack Carter a shadow Caine, the man he could have become if his life had broken out slightly differently. It’s set in an unremittingly bleak Newcastle, but it feels like it might be happening in an anti-chamber of hell, with its thoroughly amoral lead barely aware he’s spiralling towards destruction. It’s a sociopathic, Jacobean revenge tragedy set among the dirt filled suburbs of Newcastle.

Jack Carter (Michael Caine) is a professional fixer for London gangster brothers. He returns to his childhood home of Newcastle after the sudden death of his brother. But he’s not satisfied with the official explanation. Instead, he dives into an investigation, in which he cares not a jot about the collateral damage he causes or the likely reaction of the underworld powers that be as he rocks the boat to destruction, trashing the lives of everyone he meets, good and bad.

Powered by an extraordinary performance of blank nihilism and cold, unexpressed fury by Caine, nominally Jack is a man motivated by the harm done to his family. However, Hodges film is so cold-eyed and realistic about the mentality of gangsters, we know it’s just an excuse. Carter is never heart-broken, he’s annoyed. His brother may have been punished and his niece (it transpires) misused, but fundamentally what motivates Carter is the affront. By taking a pop at his family, he feels they really think they can take a pop at him. How dare they: he’s Jack Carter.

Any charm Carter has, solely comes from residual affection for Caine. By any measure, Carter is an awful man (even if he has a good turn of phrase). He is a sociopath with no concern for anyone. When friendly Keith (a young Alun Armstrong) is beaten black and blue for helping Carter, how does our hero respond? Tosses a few bank notes on his bed and tells him “buy some karate lessons”. Carter sees the world solely as made up of debts, which can be discharged by money, never mind the situation. His niece throws beer over a friend? He’ll pay for the dry-clean. Keith gets bashed up: take a roll of twenties, what’s your problem?

Carter directly kills four people (and is responsible for several other deaths), all with a blank-eyed lack of reaction. There isn’t any sadism to what he does – the deaths are mostly efficient and to his mind, justified, because by taking actions against his family they disrespected him. When he locks a woman in the boot of his car, and a pair of heavies push the car into the Tyne he doesn’t bat an eyelid at her inevitable death (never mind he slept with her hours before). People who find themselves close to Jack, or drawn into his circle, suffer terribly and he literally couldn’t care less.

Get Carter is the bleakest of all gangster films, shot with an imaginative kitchen-sink beauty by Mike Hodges, which actually carries a lot more visual glory than you might expect. Drained out colours abound – there are virtually no bright primary colours in this, with the whole of Newcastle a mix of muddy browns, soot-stained greys and filthy charcoals. Hodges’ film is also dynamic and fast-paced: he throws in striking aerial and crane shots (there is a beautiful shot that follows a car chase from a bird’s eye view), but also gets down and dirty in this grainy world.

It’s an urgent, lean and mean film constantly kicking you in the shins, but told with skill and artistry. Hodges pieces together a marvellous early scene, where Carter visits local heavy Kinnear (a suave, chillingly well-spoken John Osborne): simultaneously, in one single location, two scenes (both with vital information) play out at the same time – Carter chats to Kinnear’s moll Glenda (Geraldine Moffat), picking up vital information while on the same sofa Kinnear beats his guests at cards. Everything though is perfectly clear: masterful stuff. It’s also a film crammed with small details that reward careful viewing: Carter’s bed has a cross-stitch of “What would Jesus say?” above it (I dread to think) and on his train journey, look out for a fellow passenger with a distinctive ring.

So confidently is this put together, it’s amazing to think Hodges was a first-time director. This is a film dripping with menace, but also a horrifyingly immersive camera. We are frequently thrown into the midst of the action. Carter frequently looms over the camera or is filmed in violent motion moving towards his next goal. There is not a jot of romanticism around the film: neither about the gangsters or the bleak world they operate in. Newcastle is pre-Thatcherite hellhole, with precious little glamour. Even the gangster locales – the clubs and pubs – are bashed-up and unpleasant.

Across the board, the gangsters are exposed as cruel, heartless and vile. Touches of class are ruined by everyone’s fundamental lack of class. Cliff Brumby’s (Brian Mosley) planned classy restaurant sits atop a concrete multi-story car-park. Kinnear’s (John Osborne) fancy country house is the setting of the grimmest, most depressing orgy you’re likely to see. Carter is trying his best to dress classily, but his cruelty always punctures the illusion. He’s introduced watching a porn film with his bosses in London and the film revolves around the seamy underworld of homemade porn.

The women in the film are primarily used by the gangster as props for these films, and Get Carter doesn’t shy away from the exploitative fate for women in this world. However, you can’t disagree that it takes in a bit of exploitation itself. Britt Ekland has high billing for her single scene, where she lies mostly naked on a bed pantily having phone sex with Carter (who goes about this, as all things, with a functional efficiency, at least as interested in the excited reaction of his middle-aged landlady who is sitting in the room with him while he chats on the phone). It’s undeniably a moment for us to gawp but it still feels less cold and cruel than those awful porn films.

Carter discovers his niece has found her way into these. He even sheds a tear over this: but he doesn’t care because of what has happened to her. Again it’s all about him: Carter couldn’t care less about the morals and is perfectly happy for porn to soak up other women. He’s not really that interested in his niece: it’s all about the damage to him, that a “made man” like him should have a member of his family getting boffed like a slag for others entertainment. How bloody dare they?

Get Carter understands this is a dark and soulless world, and is a film bereft of hope. Its hero is a revenge obsessed sociopath, who only smiles in the film after he has burnt everything around him down. Gangsters destroy everything they touch and care about nothing other than themselves. All debts can be settled with money, all women are toys to be used and thrown away. Death means nothing and the world is a drained-out hell of shabby houses and dirty clubs. It’s the grimmest and finest British gangster film out there. Who would want to be gangster after seeing this?

Maria Schneider and Jack Nicholson hit the road in Antonioni’s partly frustrating, partly masterful The Passenger

Director: Michelangelo Antonioni

Cast: Jack Nicholson (David Locke), Maria Schneider (The Girl), Ian Hendy (Martin Knight), Jenny Runacre (Rachel Locke), Charles Mulvehill (David Robertson), Steven Berkoff (Stephen)

Ever wanted to jack in your life and have a go at being someone else? It’s a temptation we’ve all felt at one time or another, that chance to make a completely fresh start free of all those burdens and expectations of our own lives.

It’s a temptation thrown in the way of David Locke (Jack Nicholson) a British-American journalist, trying to make contact with rebel groups in the deepest Sahara deserts of Chad. Returning, after a failed excursion, to his ‘hotel’ in the tiny, beat-up village in the middle of the desert he finds that the only other resident, an Englishman, has died of a heart attack. The two man have a physical similarity, enough for Locke to decide to swop places with the dead man and leave Chad under a new identity as David Robertson. Curious to follow the details left in Robertson’s appointment diary, Locke finds that he has taken the identity of an arms dealer – making sense immediately of why Robertson was also in the hotel at the time – forcing Locke to stay one-step ahead of both the arms dealers and his wife Rachel (Jenny Runacre) and producer Martin (Ian Hendry) keen to talk to him about ‘Locke’s’ death.

If that sounds like it might be an action packed thriller – you’d be wrong, because let’s not forget that this is an Antonioni film, and if there is one thing you can expect from the revered auteur of the Art-House, it’s that his films are mysteries wrapped in enigmas. The Passenger is no exception, a slow, intriguing mood piece that only partially allows the audience even half a chance to puzzle out what it’s about, mixed with striking images and haunting sequences of fundamental unknowingness. Despite the paragraph above there is almost no plot in The Passenger, with the film instead focused on themes of alienation, existentialism, destiny, fate and identity. In other words all the big stuff.

Much of this is captured in the character of Locke. Played by Jack Nicholson in a stripped-down, purged style a million miles away from the “Jack” of legend, Locke is a blank. We spend almost the entire film with him, but learn virtually nothing about him. What desires or miseries or depressions drive him to abandon his life and head out into a new life? We have only vague whispers about an unhappy marriage (with a wife having an affair with someone else) and a general listless dissatisfaction with his own life and career. Locke is a character yearning for some kind of release, some kind of higher meaning – the happiest he seems to be in the movie, is hanging over the side of a cable car, arms outstretched, pretending to fly over the waters below. It’s a freedom like that – some sort of total unshackling from the modern world altogether – that he seems to want or need.

So why doesn’t he go for it? Why doesn’t he just junk Robertson’s appointment diary and escape properly into the wide world, well beyond the reach of Chad rebels, curious wives and BBC Producers? Perhaps because he is a Passenger himself, a man who lacks the essential will and freedom of purpose to make his own destiny, to escape the structure of a world he finds so constricting? Instead, he seems bound of a wheel of fire, compelled somehow to continue following some sort of structure unable to yank himself fully free of the chains of this modern world. He wants to be a free spirit, but he remains a little man, to whom events happen, who is approached by people, who follows directions not forging his own path.

He gets as close as he can to opening up by talking to a passenger of his own, a mysterious girl (played with an unaffected naturalness by Maria Schneider that is part graceful reality, part wooden stiffness but works perfectly) he encounters while following Robertson’s trail. He first spots her sitting on a bench in London, then sees her again atop Guadi’s La Pedrera in Barcelona. Is this coincidence? Is this fate? Destiny? Or is this a curious suggestion that the girl may be more than she seems? None of these questions is answered by the film, but it fits perfectly in with the unknowing vagueness and quizzical unpredictability of its events. Hammering home the blank unknowability of Schneider’s character, she isn’t even named in the film. She joins Locke on his journey, but her motivations are as vague as his – is it escape, a bohemian lark, a curiosity that guides her? Who knows?

The film continues in this vein, showing Locke drifting from Chad to the UK to Berlin, Barcelona and Seville, never seeming to allow Locke more than a few seconds of freedom. Is the film asking if there is any such thing as true freedom, that even after swopping lives Locke still finds himself locked down into following a series of pre-arranged duties, like a train on a line? It’s not clear, but it’s beautifully filmed. Antonioni’s mastery of the camera shines throughout the film, and it’s full of haunting and immersive imagery, not least in his skilful use of locations and framing, with Locke and the Girl frequently positioned oddly or even dwarfed by the architecture and locations around them, from the plains of the desert to the towers of Gaudi.

Antonioni also saves for this film some sequences which are simply breathtaking in their cinematic mastery and beauty. His control of technique is near faultless – while his art house vagueness might have you pulling your hair out at points, these sequences will have you winding the film back just to relax in their skill and confidence again. Early in the film, we see Locke sit and fake his passport in his Chad hotel – oh for the days when identity theft was as simple as glueing a new photo into a passport – the camera smoothly moves around him, while he listens to recordings of Robertson and he meeting, until it settles onto the balcony (all this in one take) at which point Robertson walks into frame and continues the conversation, Locke following him and, there we go, Antonioni has taken us suddenly into the past. Without a single cut, the camera follows the conversation before panning back round to Locke sitting once again writing.

It’s a sequence that cineateases would be raving about, if it wasn’t dwarfed by the film’s penultimate shot, a stunning seven-minute single take that would be simplicity itself to make with CGI and Steadicam today, but was somewhere achieved without the invention of others. Starting on a single shot of Locke’s Seville hotel room, the pan slowly focuses on events outside the grilled window, the camera slowly zooming in on the outside until it passes through the grill and rotates 180 degrees back to see the room from the outside, while the Girl and other mysterious people arrive and leave outside. It’s a beautiful, brilliant, sublime, masterful piece of cinema. It’s compelling, surely one of the greatest “one-take” shots in all of cinema. Simply perfect. Directors could sit and dream of making such a shot.

Antonioni’s masterful direction and wilfully obtuse exploration of his themes makes for a film that is at time frustratingly unreadable, but also crammed with opportunities for the viewer to insert their own views and interpretations, something that is only going to become more tempting (and rewarding) with repeated viewings. Alongside that, it’s a simply beautiful and sublimely made piece of cinema – and if for no other reason deserves your time.