MovieChat Forums > Psycho (1960) Discussion > RIP: Director Mike Hodges (ON TOPIC/PSY...

RIP: Director Mike Hodges (ON TOPIC/PSYCHO)


I buried this RIP in an OT post below. Time to bring it here:

OK, one more RIP here. I"ve been sitting on this one since December 2022 but he IS Psycho relevant, and interesting in some other ways:

A British director of TV and movies named Mike Hodges. Died at age 90. A nice long life.

A nice long career, too, though for me, he boils down to only four movies and one interesting Psycho anecdote. Here goes:

Hodges "made his name" with the 1971 British Michael Caine crime film, "Get Carter." Its my second favorite movie of 1971(after Dirty Harry) and sometimes when I see it again, I like it BETTER than Dirty Harry. Dirty Harry had that Hollywood Panavision polish -- Get Carter is down and dirty, gritty, immensely powerful -- I'll never forget it. It has won titles like "Best British Crime Film" and "Best British Film"(period) in some polls . That's OK by me.

The plot is simple but vicious. London mob enforcer Michael Caine defies his London mob bosses and takes a train north to the seaside village of Newcastle to investigate the drunk driving death of his brother, and to try to care for his brother's teen daughter. Caine is certain his brother was murdered, and he's gonna get him some revenge and its GLORIOUS.

Newcastle circa 1971 is at once very depressing and somehow exotic and alluring. We see how its very poor people still manage to eke out a living and to forget their woes in pubs and dance clubs. Aside from the "innocents" it seems that every man is a criminal and every woman is a hooker or in porn. That's the world Caine confronts and when he finds out what REALLY happened to his brother -- and his niece(who might be his daughter)...watch out. A lot of vicious, semi-psychotic killing ensues. And a lot of great comedy lines!

Caine turned down the rapist-killer Bob Rusk in Frenzy around this time, but he's pretty damn psycho as Carter. Difference is..he's OUR psycho..our hero. He roughs up two women, kills one of them directly, one indirectly so we get a sense of Rusk in the performance. Still, he's killing CRIMINAL women here -- in Frenzy, Rusk kills innocent women. Caine knew: there is a difference.

Get Carter also has a tres cool, synthesizer jazz score by Roy Budd that gives the movie its bleak mood as surely as Herrmann makes Vertigo romantic -- and it also fits in with the Shaft and Dirty Harry(Lalo Schrfin) scores of 1971.

It was all the way to 1980 before Mike Hodges got a "big movie again" and it couldn't have been more different than the realistic Get Carter. Flash Gordon was Dino De Laurentis trying to cash in on Star Wars with a bizarre, surreal "spaghetti SciFi actioner" that had Prestige Max Von Sydow as Ming the Merciless, a vapid American blond named Sam Jones as Flash , and a handsome British guy named Timothy Dalton in SUPPORT. It had weird orange skies in space and a classic Queen soundtrack including the title tune.

Its a cult classic, and decades later, a young teen in my circle showed me how the modern comedy "Ted" (about an oversexed talking teddy bear and his adult pal, Mark Wahlberg) made both Flash Gordon and Sam Jones hot again. Ted the bear LOVES Flash Gordon and LOVES the rather broken down blond beauty Sam Jones. In Ted 2, Ted seeks Jones' "seed" to impregnate his girlfriend. Jones woefully reveals that years of cocaine have rendered it useless...so Ted and Wahlberg sneak out to get the same baby making stuff from...Tom Brady. But I digress. "Flash Gordon" joined "Get Carter" on Mike Hodges cult classic list.

Years and years passed, and then in 1998, Hodges returned to his London/England crime roots for a movie called Croupier, which helped make Clive Owen a star as a London card dealer with mob ties (and some hot women.) The James Bond talk began immediately and hey -- Hodges had launched Timothy Dalton....

Another 5 years took Hodges and Clive Owen to a movie called "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead" which I saw out of loyalty to both men. It was a weird story. I can't remember any of it except the climactic dialogue scene, which my sig other and I started laughing at because Owen keeps saying the SAME THING OVER AND OVER when told something shocking about his dead brother:

Man: Well, your brother is dead but..
Owen: What are you trying to tell me?
Man: Well, its what happened before then..
Owen: What do you mean?
Man: Well...he was raped.
Owen: Really what are you trying to tell me?
Man: You know...raped.
Owen: I don't understand. What are you trying to tell me?
Man: Well...he was raped. He couldn't handle it.
Owen: What are you trying to tell me?
Man: Well, he was..
Owen: No..I don't understand. What are you trying to tell me?

And on and on. I'm exaggerating but only a little.

So let's leave Mike Hodges with Get Carter(an all time great), Flash Gordon(fun camp) and distantly with Croupier.

BUT: Let's also leave Mike Hodges with a great big connection to ...Psycho.

CONT

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Psycho: Let's leave Mike Hodges with the April 1976 issue of Film Comment magazine, which celebrated Hitchcock's entire career to promote Family Plot. Various famous people offered short interviews -- even Cary Grant(about four lines). And James Stewart.

But Mike Hodges wrote the best essay. About how Psycho changed his life and set him on his director's path when it came to his small North England town in the summer of 1960.

Hodges noted how the town had a giant Palace Theater that usually played the "regular stuff" to near empty houses..a melancholy salute to the death of the movie business (in 1960!)

Until it was announced that Psycho was coming to the theater. The WHOLE TOWN knew about Psycho, had heard about it "through the grapevine," had read some reviews and articles.

When Psycho played that old Palace Theater, the lines were forever and the theater was packed to the rafters the night young Mike Hodges saw it. The crowd murmured through the "Certificate X" sign put on screen before the movie started and stayed rapt throughout.

Hodges took pleasure writing this: "The private detective Arbogast looked up at the stairs. The whole crowd screamed DON'T GO UP THERE! And when Arbogast DID..pandemonium! The DOG WAS OUT OF THE MANGER."

Hodges wrote that in caps(clever man.) I don't know what "Dog was out of the manger" meant, but he communicated how the whole British crowd screamed as one and how, for one blessed night(perhaps a few weeks more) Psycho brought back the movies and their magic to his small England town...and set him on course to become a director. (Indeed, there is a BIT of Psycho in Get Carter, come to to think of it.)

So RIP, Mike Hodges. Get Carter. Flash Gordon. And one of the best pieces on Psycho I have ever read....

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Thanks for this remembrance of a piece of Psycho-related writing from Hodges.

It's a shame that Hodges never managed to top his debut, Get Carter, but as you've discussed, both Flash Gordon and Croupier have significant charms. Get Carter was recently restored. It looks and sounds amazing now:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NtstlDW0Zo

The perennially cool main theme from Get Carter (like Shifrin's stuff) was influential on and sampled a lot in the trip-hop sub-genre of the '90s, e.g.,
https://youtu.be/tCVWZqMwNss

One of Hodges' flops The Terminal Man was seriously dreadful with an utterly miscast, lovable George Segal in the lead. I'd read the Michael Crichton novel long/decades before seeing the film and where *it* was a taut, menacing, sleazy medical thriller (that in my head *looked* a lot like The Terminator) the film was a sunny bore. I really don't know what Hodges was trying to do with that.

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It's a shame that Hodges never managed to top his debut, Get Carter,

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It certainly happens. I suppose an interesting article could be written about directors who peak early and never again. That sort of happened with Peter Bogdanovich with The Last Picture Show, but he managed to put out What's Up Doc and Paper Moon(which I find rather dull and uninvolving) before he crashed. Same with William Friedkin -- The French Connection, The Exorcist and then...struggle (but he was not a very nice man, we are told, and the studios sabotaged him.)

Meanwhile, there's ol' Hitchcock -- the original long distance runner -- making his mark in the 20s, the 30's, the 40's, the 50s and actually peaking LATE(Psycho). Which was pretty amazing, you think about it.

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but as you've discussed, both Flash Gordon and Croupier have significant charms.

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I remember being amused by Flash Gordon. Its NEW popularity in the wake of the Ted films is charming to me -- I can connect with a kid decades younger than me over Flash Gordon.

I also remember when I saw Flash Gordon in 1980, I thought: "this blond guy playing the hero has no charisma - the OTHER guy -- the Errol Flynn like Brit -- he DOES." I was right -- but only sort of. Timothy Dalton became James Bond, but not for long, and he didn't become a star at all. Dalton IS good in 1991's The Rocketeer, pretty much PLAYING Errol Flynn(under a different name) as a Nazi spy. Fun movie. (Sidebar: people think Jon Hamm looks like Timothy Dalton and I'm one of them.)

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But there are other acting treats in Flash Gordon:

One of them died just this week as I type this: "Topol," aka Chaim Topol, who was most famous for the movie of Fiddler on the Roof(Zero Mostel lost out on his Broadway role) and whose Doctor Zarkoff has a great voice and presence.

But the GREATER voice and presence in Flash Gordon -- the best of them all -- is Brian Blessed, as the stocky, tan, massively bearded and muscular leader of the "Hawkmen." He's the kind of strapping, cheery, JUBILIANT support a movie like Flash Gordon needs.

And he's got his own YouTube meme: "Gordon's...ALIVE?!" Blessed evidently has made a meal of that line at personal appearances and with a podcast. ANY movie seems to have its own fan base today, thanks to the internet.

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Get Carter was recently restored. It looks and sounds amazing now:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NtstlDW0Zo

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"Better than when it came out!" (Copyright, trademark. Ha.) I saw Get Carter first run in 1971 at the drive-in with the teenage gang -- and I do remember enjoying things like Caine's phone sex session with Britt England and other sexy stuff. (Hey, I was a teenager -- and lucky or unlucky enough to be one when the R rating was peaking.)

I think it took until the 80's and VHS for me to really UNDERSTAND Get Carter, and it just got better and better on re-watches over the decades.

There are lots of great scenes in Get Carter, but two I remember:

ONE: Early on, at the racetrack, with Caine oh-so-coldly but in a friendly manner questioning his chief suspect, "Eric" (dressed in chauffeur's clothes) about what happened to Caine's brother:

"Doing well, Eric? Making good, Eric? Got a pension, do you, Eric?" (Caine makes the very name "Eric" a chilling indictment.)

When Caine comments that Eric in his chauffeur get up "Looks like he's selling martinis" -- a commercial -- Eric replies: "Oh, you've been watching television" but the pronounciation is great -- "telly- VISH -on."

This also has Caine removing Eric's sunglasses and remarking that his eyes "Still look like piss holes in the snow."

TWO: During his murderous run of revenge, Caine runs down and corners a middle aged man who is wearing a white turtleneck under a jacket. Caine questions the man about the brother's death and other horrible deeds, warning him he'll kill him if he doesn't confess. The man confesses -- and its horrible -- and Caine goes ahead and kills him anyway -- stabbing him through the white turtleneck with surgical precision through the heart, under the ribs, in a scene of "realistic murder" that I've never really forgotten(director Hodges put a the wail of distant Newcastle harbor ship onto the man's death throes.) Caine could have played Bob Rusk, easy.

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The perennially cool main theme from Get Carter (like Shifrin's stuff) was influential on and sampled a lot in the trip-hop sub-genre of the '90s, e.g.,
https://youtu.be/tCVWZqMwNss

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"Trip hop subgenre?" You certainly have educated me again. I took a listen, its nice to hear SOME of the original but it is being given a workout here.

Which reminds me: "Get Carter" got an Americanized remake with Sly Stallone(looking great with a goatee) in 2000. Michael Caine even took one of the parts. The movie, now set in upscale Seattle, looked WAY too good and Stallone's murderous rampage was WAY toned down and...its not a good remake. Except for two things:

ONE: Even as the Warner Brothers logo appears, we hear just a BIT of the original Get Carter theme and-- well, Sly has goodwill from the start. Which he squanders.

TWO: Except..there's a really good fist-fight beatdown between Stallone and Mickey Rourke(to the death) on the dance floor with truly GREAT to me "Bollywood rock and roll" on the soundtrack as the fight continues. Its almost an EXHILARATING fight because of that music. Its the only truly satisfiying scene in the remake(largely because of Mickey Rourke, who became a great presence in the 2000s with this, Sin City, and The Wrestler.)

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One of Hodges' flops The Terminal Man was seriously dreadful with an utterly miscast, lovable George Segal in the lead.

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I didn't read up on Mike Hodges imdb list when I wrote my post -- I guess I lock in on those four movies I mentioned because each in its own way made an impact(even that BIZARRE late one with Clive Owen AFTER Croupier.)

So I forgot about The Terminal Man. And yeah -- bad. To use some words again, it squandered the goodwill of both the movie and the book "The Andromeda Strain"(Michael Crichton's first splash) and George Segal (a 1970's favorite of mine, I thought he WAS a big movie star) was the wrong man for the part. Worst: even Segal's own murderous rampage, it was neither good horror nor good thriller.

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I'd read the Michael Crichton novel long/decades before seeing the film and where *it* was a taut, menacing, sleazy medical thriller (that in my head *looked* a lot like The Terminator) the film was a sunny bore. I really don't know what Hodges was trying to do with that.

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Same. Sometimes somewhere(and it might not have even been Hodges on this) just got the adapted screenplay wrong, the look wrong, the casting wrong, the pace wrong, etc.

The Terminal Man was a 1974 movie. By contrast, I watched the 1974 subway hijack thriller The Taking of Pelham 123 the other day, and the emotional set-up was this: "Oh, The Taking of Pelham 123. Matthau and Shaw and Balsam. I LOVED that movie! Loved it when I saw it in 1974, only love it more today, I'll WATCH it." When I think of The Terminal Man from the same year its like "I never need to see THAT again. I can't even remember most of it except George Segal was miscast and it went nowhere." Put another way, I'm sure I've seen Pelham(1974 version) more than 20 times. The Terminal Man -- once.

But they'll never take Get Carter away from Mike Hodges.

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