MovieChat Forums > Get Carter (1971) Discussion > The British 'Dirty Harry'

The British 'Dirty Harry'

posted 18 years ago by ecarle
20 replies | jump to latest

SPOILERS

1971 was a very tough year at the movies.

The "R" rating had been available for about three years, and so lots of movies had a newfound freedom in sex and violence. Plus a certain documentary grittiness.

Over in America, 1971 gave us that cool black cat "Shaft," (working the mean streets of Harlem and a grungy Times Square), race-baiting bully Popeye Doyle in "The French Connection," and perhaps above all, Clint Eastwood's steely-eyed force of righteous vengeance in "Dirty Harry."

Mike Hodges and star Michael Caine made their own contribution to tough-guy 1971 from across the pond with the very fine "Get Carter."

Harry and Popeye were cops. Shaft was a private eye. Caine as Jack Carter's on the other side of the law: he's an enforcer for the London mob. But like Popeye Doyle and Harry Callahan (if not the "cooler" Shaft), Jack Carter has a certain rightous rightness on his side -- he's out for vengeance. He may be a bad guy, but he's a principled guy, and (here like Popeye and Harry) he's gonna break every rule in the book to take down the punks who killed his brother.

Though all these films are similar, "Get Carter" does separate out from the American movies in that it is very much a bleak film noir in which Carter is a "bad man" pitted against worse men. He'll do things that Harry or Popeye will not do, because he has no government authority over his actions at all. His superiors are London mobsters who warn him not to mess with their Newcastle compatriots (there is an alliance between gangs), but Carter goes his own way and gets his information however he wants, which sometimes involves torture, but often only threats thereof.

With Roy Budd's moody 70's jazz-synthesizer following his every move, Michael Caine most believeably plays a gangster who is stronger and deadlier than the other gangsters he meets. As his investigation reveals that his brother was killed over pornography starring his brother's underage daughter (who is, maybe, CAINE's daugther), Caine unleashes a righteous rampage of revenge that makes Dirty Harry look like Efrem Zimbalist Jr. in his disregard for the niceties of justice.

In perhaps the film's nastiest scene, Caine corners a cowering weakling and gets the guy to 'fess up about who killed Caine's brother. Upon getting the information, Caine most angrily stabs the man straight through the heart in a medium shot execution of brutal realism. "I didn't kill him," pleads the victim. "I KNOW you didn't kill him, I KNOW you didn't kill him," sayeth Caine, killing the guy with two expert lethal stabs to match his two repeated sayings.

But Caine doesn't stop there. Men and women are killed or tortured at his hands, and when he corners the main villain, he does to the bad guy what the bad guy did to his brother: forces a bottle of whiskey down the bad guy's gullet. Caine shows off his great ability to convey rage here, his teeth clenched in anger: "Drink up, Eric...DRINK UP!" It's chilling.

Perhaps more important than the revenge plot of "Get Carter" is its distinctly unique atmosphere, which can be summed up as : "gritty early 70's working class north coast England gangster pornography noir." I think. Unlike the more polished product of "Dirty Harry" or "The French Connection," "Get Carter" is sometimes muddy to look at and difficult to hear. These Brits tend to mumble their dialogue in a kind of slang shorthand. There's a downside to the cheapish reality of the movie: some of the fight punches thrown by Caine and others look rather fake. But the brutality lies elsewhere in this movie.

It must be noted that this is perhaps the most sexual of the 1971 noir thrillers. Glimpses of pornography are trend-setting in the newly R-rated era. Caine has an early bout of "phone sex" with the delectable Britt Ekland undulating on the other end of the line, and has a fairly graphic sex scene with a woman that is intercut with footage of a racing sports car. Rather amusingly, Caine also willingly gets it on with his middle-aged landlady, who has "Austin Powers teeth," -- immediately after which, Caine faces down two baddies with a shotgun while totally in the nude.

Michael Caine's just great in the movie. He's been with us forever and now he plays twee folk like Alfred the Butler in "Batman," but in 1971, he could play both a sexy heartthrob and a tough guy with total believability. It was in his voice and his eyes.

If you want a look at how rough action thrillers were in 1971, look at "The French Connection," "Dirty Harry" and "Shaft." But don't forget "Get Carter," which is perhaps the most nasty, brutish...and oddly moving...of them all.

[–] ecarle 17 years ago

Bump. For Caine's sake.

[–] tumbledowned 17 years ago

No.

Dirty Harry = cops perspective

Get Carter = about a London gangster avenging his brothers death.

[–] ecarle 17 years ago

Fair enough difference on "premise grounds."

But I'm speaking to their shared content of "ultra-violence" and "loner anti-heroes" in 1971. And: both Harry and Carter invoke heavy vengeance against their enemies.

Oh, well. You responded. Thanks.

[–] Bulletproof81 17 years ago

I thought it was a good article, and fair. The theme of justice and revenge runs through both Carter and Harry, and although they are on different sides of the law, they are both brutal.

Take this shortbread - I'm sorry, I can't offer you any salt with that.

[–] 17 years ago

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[–] garp-26 17 years ago

I agree. I think the Dirty Harry comparison is wide of the mark. As I suggested in another post I always thought GC's contemporary soul mate was Boorman's Point Blank. Both Caine and Marvin's characters are anachronisms: the revenge they seek are against hoods that have muscled into corporate worlds, and the two protagonists peg leg their way through them with fists and weaponry, when available, as though still in razor gangs or working as mafia minders. Both men share the same sense of belonging to the past sparking speculation that they are somehow either dead, haunting their enemies or sharing revenge fantasies. Their violence is destructive and terrifying as if commited by murderous poltergeists. Caine's Carter shows some emotional depth mostly based on personal affront, but both show indifference to others suffering as well as to their own potential vulnerability.
I also take issue with Carter somehow having some virtue over his prey. Carter is a hypocrite. Perfectly happy to watch a stag film, but outraged if it involves his own family. There is no reason to suppose Carter wouldn't involve himself in any of these rackets, be it drugs or vice, when presented with the opportunity.
GC shows a transition of crime from just simply involving armed gangs and racketeers to an unholy alliance of the former with corrupt businessmen, councillors and inevitably the law. The partnerships of The Long Good Friday were just around the corner. We side with Carter if for no other reason than his struggles to make sense out of the bewildering changing criminal landscape that helped spawn Paulsen and confirms our distrust in locally elected representation.

Supernatural perhaps, baloney perhaps not

[–] 17 years ago

[deleted]

[–] garp-26 17 years ago

A fair point. It's possible to look upon the stag film watching scene as a kind of epiphany for Carter, set in motion by earlier hinting that he is planning on relocating to South America with his girlfriend (Britt Ekland's character?) but then in order to tie up all the loose ends he behaves exactly as he has done all the way through the movie. Several more murders in imaginatively sadistic style and his bringing down of Kinnear's criminal empire (albeit temporarily) was done because he had the sheer cheek to cross Jack Carter and offend his family. It's not just his past that won't let him go, but he can't let go of himself either. How does he know that after his retribution taking one or all of the gangs he's wounded wouldn't take their revenge on Doreen? Of course once Carter's assassinated (how come he didn't see that one coming - or did he?) his image as a hood is frozen in time.
GC is a deceptively simple film, successful as an efficient thriller but as you rightly point out rich in deeper themes. Interesting that the life lead by Carter and his colleagues is ultimately self defeating, not necassarily from a moral perspective, but certainly from a practical one.

Supernatural perhaps, baloney perhaps not

[–] doctorfurby 12 years ago

At times you can't tell who is the good guy and who is the bad guy in some of the dirty hairy films.

[–] palindromicevilolive 16 years ago

I would agree with the o.p. that Get Carter resembles Dirty Harry and Taxi Driver stylistically and for the most part thematically. However, there is at least one fairly substantial difference. Unlike Travis Bickle or Dirty Harry, Carter isn't trying to clean up the streets or make the world a better place. While the methods of Bickle, Harry, and Carter are somewhat similar, they aren't the same people. He isn't some cop playing by his own rules-He is a brutal gangster who has done and still does things every bit as bad as the bad guys he is chasing. The only reason he is killing the bad guys rather than killing for the bad guys is that they had the bad judgment to mess with his family. Ultimately, the message of his crusade isn't "stop doing bad things", it's "stop doing bad things to nasty blokes like me who will make you pay for it".

Perhaps that's one reason I like the film. I've always felt their was a touch of hypocrisy in characters such as Brando's Vito Corleone. The film tried too hard to make us think that this gangster is just a sweet, noble old man who happens to be in a dicey business. Portrayals like Caine's Carter strike me as much more honest.

[–] ecarle 16 years ago

Hey, I'm the OP and I've come round to reevaluate not so much my post, as my post heading. I'm also in agreement with the reevaluaton of the poster right ahead of me here (umadise.)

I stand by "Get Carter" being like "Dirty Harry" in its coming out in that gritty and ultra-violent movie year of 1971, but I think that "Get Carter" goes down such a noirish path -- Carter is a criminal, a bad-guy, a borderline psychopath in his pursuit of his brother's killers -- that it is much more connected to the gangster film in general, and the British gangster film in particular.

That is to say...the LATER British gangster films.

"Get Carter" was influential on such later very nasty British tough guy films as "The Long Good Friday" (with Bob Hoskins), "Mona Lisa" (with Hoskins and MICHAEL CAINE), "The Krays", "Sexy Beast," etc.

They don't much show "Get Carter" on TV. Its really too brutal, too sex saturated, and too grimy-looking for prime time cable play. Oh, they'll show the pretty-and-polished Stallone remake (with Michael Caine showing up again in a smaller role for big bucks), but that ain't nuthin'.

I like to slip the original "Get Carter" in the DVD player from time to time and immerse myself in its pervasive sense of the hopelessness and grime of 1971 England; the moodiness of a coastal town that has no romance to it at all, and above all, an early Michael Caine performance as a very cold, very sexual, but very uh, "fair" bad man.

[–] salieri125 16 years ago

Hi ecarle!

The Dirty Harry comparison is not wrong, although to some extent this is more because of the presence of Clint Eastwood than for the film itself. Get Carter is a crime film beholden to the style of the Italian western. Now, Dirty Harry comes out of this tradition too, to some extent, but even there a certain moral compass can be identified that is difficult if not impossible to find here. Harry and The French Connection seem to serve as critiques of the police and the society that makes them necessary, whereas one cannot really "critique" a gangster or a gunslinger: there were no previous assumptions of their goodness. One can only deromanticize such figures and their stories.

The plot: a tough but mysterious man rides into town (despite the fact that Carter has come home and everyone knows him, we the audience know little about him) and, not through any sense of "goodness" or "justice" but for purely personal reasons, "cleans it up." Aside from the modern conveniences, this could easily have been the plot of a spaghetti western (a genre still not quite out of date by 1971). And the crime film does not normally follow this model as easily as a western: the crime film may deal with a loner or loners, but these are generally already pieces of society whether society likes it or not. When Carter appears in this film he is a new thing, a previously unpredicted force not unlike Eastwood's Man With No Name, as opposed to the criminal outsider of Mann's Crime Wave or Fuller's Pickup on South Street.

(Note that my knowledge of British crime films is very limited, although I have been led to believe that, prior to the British New Wave, these were for the most part lighter affairs than their American contemporaries, despite the occasional interference by people like Jules Dassin and his Night and the City. Modern British crime films seem to have evolved from the Get Carter model, coupled with an often unhealthy dose of tongue-in-cheek.)

Crime films, like westerns, rely on a certain level of stylization and, while the violence here is somewhat stylized, the imagery is usually not. The cinematography and locations have a dour, empty, "demythologized" quality to them that fits in well with the coming of the anti-western in America (McCabe & Mrs. Miller came out in 1971 as well), although it is true that the use of more "real" and less attractive locations are by 1971 en vogue everywhere.

It's hard to imagine a "romantic" setting for a British crime film though, so I'm not sure what this last bit would accomplish aside from a commercialization of the British New Wave ideals. oh well. I'm just saying that A Fistful of Dollars and, perhaps, my favorite Italian western The Great Silence are more accurate points of comparison.

You know, given Michael Caine's propensity toward selling out, I'm surprised he never did an Italian western. But I suppose those career glory days of the mid to late 60s and early 70s prevented him from having to stoop so low. I'm sure that if such films had appeared in the 80s he would have done them.

'Tis a coward I am - but I will hold your coat.

[–] ecarle 16 years ago

Points well made, Salieri. And hi back atcha.

I suppose I should clarify my "romantic" comment a bit.

"Get Carter" is set in a "seaside town," by the ocean, and often in movies (and in real life), such settings are romanticized and beautiful and a place to "get away from it all."

Not so much in "Get Carter." The ocean as we see it in the final minutes of "Get Carter" (as Caine chases down Eric and pours him a drink, heh) is gray, bleak, pretty much ugly. There is no romance to the sea in this movie...and I doubt indeed that any crime picture could have "romance," beyond failed noir romance.

I'm weak on the Italian Westerns, but certainly it can be said that as the traditional American studio Western died out in the sixties, it was replaced two ways: (1) by the Italian Western and (2) by the "urban cop action" movie. Dirty Harry is more gunslinger than cop; Jack Carter perhaps more gunslinger than villain. In both films, these guys go up against tough odds quite willingly and reduce the bad guys to corpses rather rapidly.

"Get Carter" may be a model for so many British gangster films after it because it came fairly early in the "R" rated period and hence was able to take the violence and the sex and the grit to a whole new level of reality and menace (despite, as I note above, a few too-fake punches by Caine and others.)

Movie history is history, period. Those films in the 1971-1972 corridor are of a like we'll never see again: violent, gritty, sexual, nihilistic. They reflected the radical times in which they were made, but were then, and remain now, oddly exhilarating, a shout against all the rot of the world. It was fun to watch Harry and Jack and Shaft and Popeye clean up, even if not all of them were than clean themselves.

[–] ecarle 12 years ago

Time to get Carter a bump.

[–] 12 years ago

[deleted]

[–] trenthouseforlife 11 years ago

Agree that Doreen is probably Carter's daughter - have posted another thread on this topic.

[–] MetalWorks 11 years ago

I was going to say: The british Point Blank
But then i remembered, John Boorman is british

[–] activista 9 years ago

Actually, like some posters here have said---GET CARTER is much closer thematically to POINT BLANK than DIRTY HARRY----it's funny, because I was just thinking that a couple of hours ago when thinking about GET CARTER----mainly because there's a CD called BUDDHISM which has the opening theme song of the film, and another song that didn't make into the film. It's collection of movie themes by the composer of the GET CARTER theme song,Roy Budd, and it's very good---worth tracking down,too.

[–] ecarle 7 years ago

ecarle returns 10-year plus later to "re-think his OP":

I find myself in support of what I said in that OP about how Get Carter fits in with the R-rated grit,sex and violence of 1971 movies, but...the film really doesn't seem much like Dirty Harry to me at all after some re-thinking.

Yes...both Harry and Carter are out for revenge against evil baddies, and yes, both Harry and Carter are pretty merciless in what they do but...

Harry is so much more clearly a hero with at least some respect for the law and police and killing ONLY the vile Scorpio and Carter...is a near-psychopath. A very bad man who puts his self-loathing and rage into action against the men(and women) who conspired to kill his brother and ruin his niece(daughter?)

In short, I still support my original post...but I no longer support the TITLE of my original post. I no longer feel that Dirty Harry is the right analogy to Get Carter.

Point Blank (and its Mel Gibson remake, Payback) is a lot closer.

"Signed,
ecarle"

Hah.

[–] 7 years ago

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