North Toward Homicide

By J.C.

Get Carter is a doggedly nasty piece of business made in blatant but inept imitation of Point Blank. While the violence in Point Blank defines some surreal and chilling points about the savagery of contemporary urban life, the mayhem in Get Carter is a gruesome and almost pornographic visual obsession. Fledgling DirectorMike Hodges clearly hoped to put together a jazzy paean to the classic detective story; the film's protagonist, in fact, is shown in a couple of scenes poring over a copy of Raymond Chandler's Farewell, My Lovely. But Hodges seems to have learned more from Mickey Spillane.

The plot is insanely complex, but has generally to do with a kinky London hood named Carter (Michael Caine) who returns home to the north of England to arrange his murdered brother's funeral. In this case, that means maiming, murdering or brutalizing what seems like half the population of Newcastle--a process Hodges shows in elaborate and gory detail. Against such competition, one or two good things tend to get lost: a first-rate, glacial performance by Caine, and the brooding, striking photography of Wolfgang Suschitsky. Neither Hodges nor anyone else connected with the film seems to have understood that Chandler's private eye, Philip Marlowe, is really a knight.

Carter, like Spillane's Mike Hammer, is a homicidal knave, and in dealing with him the film takes on the very qualities it is trying to portray. It wallows in its ceaseless bloodbath and emerges like its protagonist -- sleazy and second-rate. . J.C.

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