Get Carter (1971)

When Jack went home!

Get Carter, not just one of the finest exponents of British neo-noir, but one of the greatest British films ever, period. Michael Caine stars as Jack Carter, a tough no nonsense operator in the London underworld who returns to his home town of Newcastle Upon Tyne when his brother turns up dead.

Directed and adapted to screenplay by Mike Hodges from Ted Lewis' novel "Jack's Return Home", Get Carter is a bleakly atmospheric masterwork that takes the period setting of the time and blends harsh realism with film noir sensibilities and filters it through an uncut prism of doom.

Jack Carter as created by Caine and Hodges is the quintessential film noir anti-hero. He smokes French cigarettes and reads Raymond Chandler, there is no hiding the respect and homages to c...

Michael Caine is "Jack Carter" - a gangster who heads from London to Newcastle in England's north east to bury his brother "Frank". On the face of it, he was killed in a car accident after taking a dram or two too many. Thing is, though, "Carter" knows that his brother was no whisky drinker - and so smells a rat. Soon he is embroiled again in the local gangland antics in which he grew up, and on the trail of the truth and the perpetrators. To be honest, I don't think this is Caine's finest work - he is distinctly wooden for much of it; even when naked pointing a shotgun at two men (George Sewell and Tony Beckley) who caught him in flagrante delicto with Rosemarie Dunham's "Edna". That said, though, Mike Hodges captures well the gritty and threatening environment in which the story is set; ...