The British 'Dirty Harry'
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garp-26 — 18 years ago(September 28, 2007 11:18 AM)
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 -
palindromicevilolive — 18 years ago(January 16, 2008 06:17 PM)
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 — 18 years ago(March 08, 2008 10:02 AM)
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 saythe 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 — 18 years ago(March 08, 2008 06:53 PM)
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 — 18 years ago(March 08, 2008 10:32 PM)
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 movieand 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. -
activista — 11 years ago(March 08, 2015 11:17 PM)
Actually, like some posters here have saidGET 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 goodworth tracking down,too.
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ecarle — 9 years ago(January 29, 2017 10:05 AM)
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, butthe film really doesn't seem much like Dirty Harry to me at all after some re-thinking.
Yesboth 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 Carteris 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 postbut 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.