By Erin Free
Forget the chatty, bold-as-brass bad guys of Guy Ritchie’s Brit-nouveau gangster flicks, or the sneering brutes of Rise Of The Footsoldier. If you want to source the blueprint for the tough-as-nails cinematic UK gangster, go no further than Jack Carter, the ice-cold brute at the heart of Mike Hodges’ brilliant 1971 thriller, Get Carter. As played with a scathing lack of compromise by Michael Caine (who was on an absolute hot streak after appearing in the era-defining hits Zulu, The Ipcress File, Alfie, and The Italian Job), Carter is the definitive British gangster. A terse, embittered and disturbingly functional go-to man for the London mob, things get uncharacteristically personal for Jack Carter when he travels to the drab, grey surrounds of Newcastle for his brother’s funeral. Despite showing no emotion (Caine deliberately and expertly keeps everything below the surface in a terrific example of slow-burn acting), Carter begins to suspect foul play in his brother’s death, and pretty soon he’s bashing and threatening his way through Newcastle’s criminal underworld, relentlessly and ruthlessly looking for answers.
The most obviously appealing thing about Jack Carter is his toughness. Even when outmanned and outgunned, he doesn’t flinch. “You’re a big man, but you’re in bad shape,” he famously sneers to a thug sizing him up. “With me it’s a full time job. Now behave yourself.” But he’s also funny in a dry and taciturn way (“You know, I’d almost forgotten what your eyes looked like,” he says to an opposite number. “Still the same. Pissholes in the snow”), and rates as sympathetic by dint of the fact that all of the people around him are so resolutely appalling. The film is wholly without charm and stylisation, and Carter is always believable when placed against the nihilistic background of a grim, corrupt, and soulless England. Carter, however, is more than just a hardman. As the film unravels, his metallic outer shell is slowly corroded, revealing a well of pain – and, most surprisingly, a sense of responsibility – that drives his violent actions.
“A gangster, more often than not, is a policeman who’s taken the law into his own hands, protecting his family and providing them with a criminal livelihood,” Caine said to The Guardian in 1997 of Jack Carter. “We got an awful lot of stick for the film’s violence. But it was violent only in so far as I wanted to get across the point that if you whack a bloke eight or ten times in the face, he isn’t going to get up and come back at you. Just one proper hit in the face and he’s going to be across the room. And you never see that in a lot of films. What you get these days is a pornography of violence, which is much more dangerous than a pornography of sex. I’d rather see people screwing than killing one another. In Get Carter, we were criticised because we showed the reality of violence. But just one stab in the stomach – that’s all it takes. I’ve been a soldier, and I know about the trauma of violence.”
It’s perhaps that sense of understanding that makes Jack Carter such a complex and unforgettable character.
