Жек Картердің құпиясы: Ньюкасл қылмысы

1971 British film by Mike Hodges
the 1971 film

Newcastle born gangster Jack Carter has lived in London for years in the employ of organised crime bosses Gerald and Sid Fletcher. Jack is sleeping with Gerald's girlfriend Anna and plans to escape with her to South America, but he must first return to Newcastle and Gateshead to attend the funeral of his brother, Frank, who died in a purported drink driving accident. His bosses warn him not to stir up trouble, as they are friendly with the Newcastle mob. Unsatisfied with the official explanation, Jack investigates for himself. At the funeral, Jack meets his teenage niece Doreen, and Frank's evasive mistress, Margaret. Jack goes to Newcastle Racecourse, seeking his old acquaintance Albert Swift for information about his brother's death, but Swift evades him. Jack encounters another old associate, Eric Paice, who refuses to tell Jack who is employing him as a chauffeur. Tailing Eric leads him to the country house of crime boss Cyril Kinnear. Jack confronts Kinnear but learns little from him; he also meets a glamorous drunken woman, Glenda. As Jack leaves, Eric warns him against damaging relations between Kinnear and the Fletchers. Back in town, Jack is threatened by henchmen who want him to leave town, but he fights them off, capturing and interrogating one to find out who wants him gone. He is told the name "Brumby". Jack knows Cliff Brumby as a businessman with controlling interests in local seaside amusement arcades. Visiting Brumby's house, Jack discovers the man knows nothing about him and, believing he has been set up, he leaves. The next morning, two of Jack's London colleagues – Con McCarthy and Peter the Dutchman – arrive, sent by the Fletchers to take him back, but he escapes. Jack meets Margaret to talk about Frank, but the Fletchers' men are waiting and pursue him. He is rescued by Glenda, who takes him in her Sunbeam Alpine sports car to meet Brumby at his new restaurant development at the top of a multi storey car park. Brumby identifies Kinnear as being behind Frank's death, also explaining that Kinnear is trying to take over his business. He offers Jack £5,000 to kill the crime boss, which he refuses. Jack has sex with Glenda at her flat, where he finds and watches a pornographic film in which Doreen is forced to have sex with Albert. The other participants in the film are Glenda and Margaret. Jack becomes enraged and pushes Glenda's head underwater as she is taking a bath. She tells him the film was Kinnear's and that she thinks Doreen was pulled into the production by Eric. Forcing Glenda into the boot of her own car, Jack drives off to find Albert. Jack tracks down Albert, who confesses he told Brumby that Doreen was Frank's daughter. Brumby showed Frank the film to incite him to call the police on Kinnear so Eric and two of his men arranged Frank's death. Having extracted this information, Jack fatally stabs Albert. Jack is attacked by the London gangsters and Eric, who has informed Fletcher of Jack and Anna's affair. In the ensuing shootout, Jack shoots Peter dead. As Eric and Con escape, they push the sports car into the river, unaware that Glenda is in the boot. Returning to the car park, Jack finds and beats Brumby before throwing him to his death. He then posts the film to the Scotland Yard vice squad. Jack abducts Margaret. He telephones Kinnear (who is in the middle of a wild party at his home), telling him that he has the film, and makes a deal for Kinnear to give him Eric in exchange for his silence. Kinnear agrees, sending Eric to an agreed location; however, he subsequently phones an associate. Jack drives Margaret to the grounds of Kinnear's estate, kills her with a fatal injection, and leaves her body there. He then calls the police to raid Kinnear's party. Jack chases Eric along a beach. He forces Eric to drink a bottle of whisky as Eric had done to Frank, then beats him to death with his shotgun. Having avenged Frank and Doreen, Jack walks along the shoreline, where he is shot dead from a distance by Kinnear's associate.

There was pressure from MGM to have more big name American stars in the film, which was successfully resisted by Hodges. As well as Telly Savalas, names posited by Klinger and studio executives were Joan Collins, and someone Hodges described as "the Canadian lead actress in TV's Peyton Place", which is likely a reference to Barbara Parkins. Michael Caine as Jack Carter. Hodges wrote the screenplay with Ian Hendry in mind for Carter, but learned that Michael Klinger had already signed up Caine for the role. With the backing of a major studio, Klinger was keen to secure a big name for the lead, and Caine was very prominent at the time, having starred in Alfie, The Italian Job and The Ipcress File. Hodges was surprised that a star of Caine's stature would want to play such a thoroughly unlikeable person as Carter. Giving his reasons for wanting to be involved with the film, the actor said "One of the reasons I wanted to make that picture was my background. In English movies, gangsters were either stupid or funny. I wanted to show that they're neither. Gangsters are not stupid, and they're certainly not very funny". He identified with Carter as a memory of his working class upbringing, having friends and family members who were involved in crime and felt Carter represented a path his life might have taken under different circumstances: "Carter is the dead end product of my own environment, my childhood; I know him well. He is the ghost of Michael Caine". He made subtle changes to Hodges' depiction of Carter in the script, cut out pleasantries and gave him a cold, hard edge; closer to Lewis's original envisioning of the character. In a strange coincidence, Caine's stand in on the film was a man called Jack Carter. and poor physical condition were apparent on set in Newcastle, and his envy at the success of his contemporary Caine was exacerbated by his drinking. Hodges and Caine used his animosity towards Caine to their advantage to create extra tension in the scenes between Carter and Paice. John Osborne as Cyril Kinnear, Jack's main adversary. Osborne, a famous playwright, was an unusual choice of actor; he was suggested by Hodges' agent. The writer enjoyed the change, and saw it as a way to erase the image in the public's mind of him as an angry young man. Britt Ekland as Anna. Ekland was cast as the leading lady of the film, as she was a prominent sex symbol of the time and would have already been familiar to US audiences through her work in The Night They Raided Minsky's and Stiletto. Accordingly, her small role in the film was overemphasised in the publicity. Ekland was afraid of becoming typecast, having already played two gangster's molls before Carter. Bryan Mosley as Cliff Brumby. MGM executives initially wanted Telly Savalas for the part of the "big man", but were impressed by Coronation Street actor Mosley's performance in fight scenes in Far from The Madding Crowd. A devout Roman Catholic, Mosley was concerned about taking part in such a violent film with depictions of criminal behaviour, and consulted his priest over the moral implications. George Sewell as Con McCarty. Sewell was the man who introduced Barbara Windsor to Charlie Kray. He grew up in working class Hoxton and had come to acting late when, in 1959, he joined Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop. A well known face on British television in the 1960s, his sandblasted features and shifty, haunted looks made him ideal for playing villainous characters or hard bitten detectives. He seemed ideally cast as a London gangster colleague of Carter's. After Carter, Sewell became more known for playing policemen rather than villains. Tony Beckley as Peter. Lewis depicted Peter as a misogynistic homosexual in his novel; these elements were not emphasised in the film, although the character is flamboyant and camp. Beckley had developed a specialism of playing sadistic criminals, so his part in Carter was somewhat similar to his role of "Camp Freddy" alongside Caine in The Italian Job. Alun Armstrong as Keith. This was Armstrong's screen debut. The themes of Get Carter echo to a certain extent those of Armstrong's better known role 25 years later in BBC drama Our Friends in the North. He wrote a letter to MGM when he learned it was making the film in Newcastle, and he was invited to meet director Mike Hodges, who wanted to cast local actors. Bernard Hepton as Thorpe. Bradford born Hepton was cast by Hodges as Kinnear's nervous messenger. Petra Markham as Doreen Carter. Petra Markham was a 24 year old experienced theatre actress when she was asked to play the role of Carter's 16 year old niece. Her appearance in only four scenes in the film meant she could balance the film work with appearing at the Royal Court and her role in the television series Albert and Victoria. She went on to play the unfortunate Rose Chapman in EastEnders. Geraldine Moffat as Glenda. Moffatt was an experienced actress who had trained at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. She attracted Hodges' attention not just for her good looks but for her work on Alun Owen's television plays Stella and Doreen. Dorothy White as Margaret. White had a successful career as a television actress and was particularly well known for Z Cars, but the part of Margaret was her first credited cinematic role (the only other being a part in the 1955 film Touch & Go). She had previously worked with Mike Hodges on the television play Suspect. Terence Rigby as Gerald Fletcher, one of the London crime boss brothers. Rigby was another actor Hodges cast from his familiarity in television police drama. Mike Hodges recruited a band of experienced character actors to play the small supporting roles. Godfrey Quigley was cast as Eddie, a colleague of Frank Carter's. Kevin Brennan appears as Harry the card player. Ben Aris, who plays one of the architects, had previously appeared in such films as if , The Charge of the Light Brigade and Hamlet.

In the late 1960s, a relaxation in film censorship produced an increase in dark, uncompromising films, with many directors pushing the boundaries of acceptability. Get Carter was a film that explored this freedom. The project went from concept to finished film in just 10 months. After searching many publishers for material to adapt into a film, Klinger purchased the rights to Ted Lewis' novel Jack's Return Home. Andrew Spicer has written that "he [Klinger] sensed its potential to imbue the British crime thriller with the realism and violence of its American counterparts". Klinger had been approached in 1969 by another producer, Nat Cohen, to make films for Metro Goldwyn Mayer (MGM). In financial trouble and shutting down its British operations, MGM was in the process of closing its British studios at Borehamwood and was looking to make smaller budget films to turn a profit. At this time Klinger's friend Robert Littman had been appointed head of MGM Europe and so Klinger took his proposal to him. MGM agreed to a reasonable but below average budget of 750,000 (there is some dispute as to whether this figure refers to dollars or pounds) for the production. Within months of agreeing to the deal MGM had pulled out of the UK. Klinger had seen Mike Hodges' television film Suspect (1969) and immediately decided he was the ideal candidate to direct his new project. Klinger contacted Hodges on 27 January 1970 with a copy of Jack's Return Home and contracted him to write and direct the film, paying him a flat fee of £7,000 for his services. Steve Chibnall writes: "his treatment retained the essential structure of Lewis's novel with its strong narrative drive, but introduced some minor changes to characterisation and more fundamental alterations to narratology". to a place he was familiar with, considering Grimsby, Lowestoft, Hull and North Shields and his own assassination were further alterations from the novel, emphasising the film's parallels with revenge tragedy Hodges' decision to kill off Carter was initially protested by MGM executives, as they wanted the character to survive in the event that the film proved successful enough to warrant a sequel. Hodges described how wandering alone through the upper structure, he realised how the different levels could be used to reveal the hunter, Carter, and the hunted, Brumby, simultaneously but without either being aware of the other – adding to the suspense. The location for Cyril Kinnear's house, Dryderdale Hall, near Hamsterley, Bishop Auckland, provided a real life connection with organised crime. It was the recently vacated country house of North East fruit machine businessman Vince Landa, who had fled the country in 1969 after the murder of his right hand man Angus Sibbett, the so called one armed bandit murder. Many believed the crime was part of a failed attempt by the Kray twins to gain control of the Newcastle underworld. Michael Klinger and the MGM publicity spokesman dismissed the use of the location as mere coincidence; however, Hodges was aware of the significance of the house and chose it deliberately. Other locations in Newcastle and Gateshead, Northumberland and County Durham were also used.

Principal photography took place in the North East between 17 July and 15 September 1970. Asked to comment on what he was aiming for in the look of the film, cinematographer Wolfgang Suschitzky said "The camera work on it [ ] it was very influenced by Mike Hodges who has a very good eye for setups and he of course conferred with his operator and myself, but he influenced all of us, and much of the good look is due to him, I confess. My main task was lighting on location, very moderately, and waiting for the right daylight and setting the exposure on the lens". In the first week of shooting in Newcastle, the ACTT called the crew out on a one day strike. At the advice of Richard Lester, Hodges and his assistant director stayed at a separate hotel to the rest of the cast and crew, which enabled him to have some respite from the production after the shooting day was done. Klinger was present on set for much of the film shoot. However, Hodges said he encountered very little interference from the producer. At one point Klinger and Caine asked if Hodges might work in a "chase sequence", but he persuaded them that it would draw too many comparisons with Bullitt Hodges tried to rehearse the racecourse scene between Caine and Hendry in their hotel the night before shooting, but "Hendry's drunken and resentful state forced Hodges to abandon [the] attempt". Hodges described Caine as "a complete dream to work with". which made microphone placement difficult. Hodges moved the camera and the boom closer to Osborne as the scene progressed. The chase scene was shot in reverse, with Hodges filming Eric's death scene first because of Hendry's poor condition, Hodges being worried that he would be too out of breath to play the death scene after running. Hodges chose the beach for its bleak, dark atmosphere but when he returned to shoot the scene he found it bathed in bright sunshine, unsuitable for the sombre conclusion he was hoping for. He waited hours until the sun began setting to capture the overcast shadowy lighting seen in the film. The film shows the beach black with coal spoilings, dumped there by the mine's conveyor system. The conveyor, a common sight on the East Durham coast, was known locally as 'The Flight'. In the early 2000s, £10 million was spent removing these conveyors and the concrete towers, and cleaning tons of coal waste from the beaches of East Durham. The cleaning programme was known as 'Turning the Tide'.

Klinger was a hands on producer who remained present throughout shooting and in post production. He suggested Hodges use John Trumper as editor. Hodges said that he and Trumper argued and disagreed constantly, but he still thought he was a "brilliant, brilliant editor" and was "very grateful to him for [ ] how much he contributed". Sound editing and dubbing was done by Jim Atkinson, whom Hodges described as "so obsessive about the job". He gave Hodges multiple possibilities of how the sound could be dubbed, and explored every angle. Klinger was worried that the debut director might be overwhelmed with too many options, but Hodges said he and Atkinson got on very well. To save time and money Budd did not use overdubs, simultaneously playing a real harpsichord, a Wurlitzer electric piano and a grand piano. Budd described the experience as "uncomfortable, but it sounded pleasant". The theme tune features the sounds of the character's train journey from London to Newcastle. As Carter drives away from the flats, with Glenda in the boot of the car, the tyres make a screeching sound. This was later sampled by Vangelis, who used it on the 1981 Jon and Vangelis track The Friends of Mr Cairo. The theme was released as a 7" vinyl single by Pye Records in 1971, titled simply Carter and backed with "Plaything", another piece composed for the soundtrack. Original copies of the record are much sought after by collectors and sell for around £100. The soundtrack—including pieces not used in the film—was originally only available in its entirety in Japan, where it was released on Odeon Records. It was released in the UK in 1998 by the Cinephile label, a subsidiary of Castle Communications. In 2012, the theme was included on the Soul Jazz Records compilation British TV, Film and Library Composers. The film includes other music which is not included on the soundtrack LP. The music playing in the nightclub scene is an uptempo cover of the 1969 Willie Mitchell tune "30 60 90" performed live by the Jack Hawkins Showband, which was the resident band at the Oxford Galleries night club. The pub singer, played by Denea Wilde, performs a cover of "How About You?" by Burton Lane and Ralph Freed, It was later reclassified as 'R', meaning children under the age of 17 had to be accompanied by an adult. Chibnall describes the flower power imagery as "what seems like a desperate and misguided attempt to suggest the hipness of a genre which had largely fallen out of favour". However, movie poster expert Sim Branaghan liked its eccentricity, calling it was "that kind of quirkiness you wouldn't get these days". Promotional shots and poster artwork exist from the film showing Carter holding a pump action shotgun; in the finished film, the only shotgun used by Carter is a double barrelled shotgun, which Carter finds on top of his brother Frank's wardrobe. MGM sold distribution rights to the film in the U. S. to its future subsidiary United Artists, which promoted it poorly, amidst worries the cockney dialogue in the opening scene would be unintelligible to U. S. audiences. The film's release was delayed while parts of the film were redubbed, with no great improvement. UA placed the film on the declining drive in movie circuit, Michael Klinger complained in 1974 to president of UA Eric Pleskow about the lacklustre promotion of Carter, and tried to get him to relinquish the U. S. rights to the film so that Klinger could find a better distributor. The film did not encounter many censorship problems, although the scene where Carter knifes Albert Swift caused concern for the censor John Trevelyan. In South Africa the censor cut out Britt Ekland's phone sex scene, shortening her already brief role; her name was still left on the poster, leaving filmgoers to wonder why she was advertised as appearing. A resurgence of critical and public interest in the film in the 1990s led to the British Film Institute (BFI) releasing a new print of the film in 1999. It worked with Hodges to restore the film, with Hodges sourcing another set of negatives of the original opening, which were found in the archives of the BBC. The team then spliced the beginning segment onto a high quality print of the film. and went on general release on 11 June 1999, showing at the Tyneside Cinema in Newcastle.

On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 87% based on 38 reviews, with an average rating of 7.50/10; the site's critical consensus reads "Darkly entertaining and tightly wound, Get Carter is a gritty revenge story done right". In 2003, Steve Chibnall observed a large gender imbalance in voting on the film up to April 2002, with less than 6% of votes cast (where the voters gave their gender) by women (53 out of 947). He also noticed a substantial increase in women voting on the film in the eight months leading up to April 2002. He thought the general stance of British critics "was to admire the film's power and professionalism while condemning its amorality and excessive violence". Geoff Mayer observed that "Mainstream critics at the time were dismayed by the film's complex plotting and Carter's lack of remorse". In Sight and Sound, Tom Milne said the film was well constructed and had good characterisation, but lacked the mystery and charisma of the earlier American crime films it attempted to emulate. He found Carter's motivations were inconsistent, either being an avenging angel or an "authentic post permissive anti hero, revelling in the casual sadism". In contrast, Nigel Andrews found the characters to be clichéd archetypes of the criminal underworld, such as the "homosexual chauffeur, bloated tycoon, glamorous mistress", describing the film as "perfunctory". Richard Weaver in Films and Filming praised the realism of the film, describing it as "crime at its most blatant", while George Melly writing in The Observer confessed to vicarious enjoyment of it, but admitted it was "like a bottle of neat gin swallowed before breakfast. It's intoxicating all right, but it'll do you no good". Steve Chibnall writes that "America was rather more used to hard boiled storytelling" and that reviewers there were "more prepared than British criticism to treat Get Carter as a serious work", Pauline Kael admiring its "calculated soullessness" and wondering if it signalled a "new genre of virtuoso viciousness". US publication Box Office gave a cautiously approving review, describing the film as "nasty, violent and sexy all at once". It predicted that "It should please in the action market, but won't win any laurels for Caine although his portrayal of the vicious anti hero impresses". The reviewer also opined that "Tighter editing would help considerably". Roger Ebert was less reserved in his praise, writing that "the movie has a sure touch". He noted the "proletarian detail" of the film which is "unusual in a British detective movie. Usually we get all flash and no humanity, lots of fancy camera tricks but no feel for the criminal strata of society". Of Caine's performance he wrote, "The character created by Caine is particularly interesting. He's tough and ruthless, but very quiet and charged with a terrible irony". Judith Crist in New York magazine gave a glowing review, saying "Michael Caine is superb, suave and sexy" and describing the film as "a hard, mean and satisfying zinger of the old tough tec school done in frank contemporary terms". Variety also praised the film, saying it "not only maintains interest but conveys with rare artistry, restraint and clarity the many brutal, sordid and gamy plot turns". However, Jay Cocks writing in Time was disparaging, calling the film "a doggedly nasty piece of business" and comparing it unfavourably to Point Blank. The film appeared on several US critics' lists of best films of the year.