Get Carter
By 1971 London had stopped swinging, the Beatles had split up, and in stark contrast to his affable Charlie Croker two years earlier in The Italian Job, Michael Caine was playing the brutally amoral lead in Get Carter. Set in a Tyneside ravaged by industrial decline and with ugly modern architecture as cold as the protagonist the film remains an unsettling and violent watch: Carter’s elimination of his enemies is almost clinically detached; his phone sex with Britt Ekland while his landlady listens is disturbing for the old woman and us; Carter’s own death is pointless and dramatically abrupt. Caine was already a big name by this time, but the film was received poorly. Perhaps this was because it was not what was expected of a Michael Caine vehicle, though a look at the rest of the cast (Ekland excluded) should have given a clue: the brilliant Terence Rigby; George Sewell, Bernard Hepton and Ian Hendry; Look Back in Anger author John Osborne . Debutant director Mike Hodges took risks with the film, including using jazz musician Roy Budd to produce the memorable score, and years after the disappointing opening it is now rightly considered an idiosyncratic and original classic of British cinema.
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Current top 10
1: Oliver!
2: Zulu
3: The Railway Children
4: The Italian Job
5: Life of Brian
6: Trainspotting
7: The Third Man
8: The 39 Steps
9: The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover
10: Local Hero
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