GET CARTER
Like its title character, Get Carter was a film executed with ruthless efficiency. In January 1970, Mike Hodges - a television director who’d worked on ITV investigative show World In Action - took a meeting with producer Michael Klinger, who had the rights to Ted Lewis’ pulp crime novel Jack’s Return Home. Immediately Hodges got to work - and didn’t stop. “From the moment I got the book, it was finished within 38 weeks, ” he reflects now. “It was made in such a white heat.”
Joining him was Michael Caine, an actor who had seen his star ascend after playing the roguish womaniser in , the spy Harry Palmer in and the bullion-swiping criminal in the cosy romp . Never, though, had he played a character as cold-blooded as Jack Carter. An enforcer for a London crime family, Carter travels to his hometown of Newcastle to investigate the death of his brother Frank, only to discover his niece Doreen has been sucked into the seedy
