Even after 50 years, do we properly get Carter? And understand that his awful destiny is bound up with British shame, envy and the class system? Mike Hodges created a Brit-crime magnum opus with this unforgettably sleazy, slimy, nasty film from 1971 – now on re-release, linked to the director’s retrospective at London’s BFI Southbank. It is a violent kitchen-sink pulp with the observational brilliance and dour working-class realism of something by Ken Loach, adapted by Hodges from the novel Jack’s Return Home by the neglected British writer Ted Lewis.
Hodges gave the role of a lifetime to Michael Caine as the dead-eyed, pill-popping gangland enforcer Jack Carter, who is working for London’s mobster porn supremos with their interest in trafficking and exploitation. Carter journeys up from “the smoke” to his Newcastle hometown to investigate the apparent suicide of his brother Frank. But plenty of influential people don’t want that can of worms opened. Caine brought the cool, near-sociopathic self-possession he’d shown as Alfie and Harry Palmer, and cranked it up to a new level of ruthlessness. It is the unmistakable halting sing-song of Caine’s delivery that makes sense of the legendary pre-violence speech: “You’re a big man but you’re in bad shape; with me, it’s a full-time job. Now behave yourself.” (Carter has apparently lost his own north-east accent.) This was a line that Hodges wrote himself; it isn’t in the book.
