 Get Carter (1971) There's a reason people remake these old Michael Caine flicks … they're indefagitably hip, always surprising even when they're not that great, and imbued with a swagger that most leading men can't touch. He may have dimmed the flame by appearing in ten thousand movies a year since his heyday, but Michael Caine, at his best, has a brand of cool that makes Paul Newman seem like an out-and-out sissypants. Get Carter is Michael Caine at his best. Given that it's more than 30 years old, the film still seems surprisingly violent and sexy, and it's hard to predict even though its conventions have since been laundered by countless cool-school macho-man crime flicks. Caine is Jack Carter, a London thug who returns to his shitty Northern seaside hometown of Newcastle to avenge his brother's death. The mystery unfolds organically, leaving the viewer as intrigued as Carter is, and as outraged when he gets to the bottom of things. There's a lot of shifty business, dubious alliances, shady characters, shameless women, and dirty dealings, none of it seeming clichéd, all of it drawing you in to the spiral of degradation the storyline traces. Excellent cinematography and a right bastard of a groovy score by Roy Budd. Shock ending too. I haven't seen the Stallone remake of it (in which Caine has a cameo), but the story's so good, my guess is it withstands even the bullshit Hollywood treatment it surely received. The original, though, is the original. For once, I have to agree with the hipsters; Get Carter shits my pants.
Review by La Fée |