Book Review: Get Carter (1970) by Ted Lewis

Get Carter is hands down the most iconic British gangster film of all time, and it's arguably the most memorable role of Michael Caine's career. It's odd, then, that it took so long for a publisher to reissue the novel it was based on. The original novel was called Jack's Return Home, which is an accurate, if underwhelming, description of the contents therein. And now the eternal question: which is better, the book or the film? The answer is that this one of the rare cases where the book and film are equally superb.

For the few people unfamiliar with the film or the book, the story follows London hood Jack Carter as he returns to his hometown, an industrial town in the north of England, for the funeral of his brother Frank. Jack suspects that Frank's death in a car crash wasn't accidental, and he's soon putting the hurt on various people to try and find out the truth. The local gangsters and Jack's bosses in London don't like that Jack is ruffling feathers and breaking heads, and decide it would be better if he was dead.

The novel has not aged one bit. The plot is tight and tense, but what really stands out is Lewis' dyspeptic prose. Here's his description of the patrons at a pretentious club/casino:

Inside, the decor was pure British B-feature except with better lighting. The clientele thought they were select. They were farmers, garage proprietors, owners of chains of cafes, electrical contractors, builders, quarry owners; the new Gentry. And occasionally, thought never with them, their terrible off-spring. The Sprite drivers with the accents not quite right, but ten times more like it than their parents, with their suede boots and their houndstooth jackets and their ex-grammar school girlfriends from the semi-detached trying for the accent, indulging in a bit of finger pie on Saturdays after the halves of pressure beer at the Old Black Swan, in the hope that the finger pie will accelerate the dreams of the Rover for him and the mini for her and the modern bungalow, a farmhouse style place, not too far from the Leeds Motorway for the Friday shopping.

Throughout the novel Lewis applies an acid wash to English society; more specifically, the culture and environment of ugly, money-obsessed, industrial towns in the North. Sometimes the novel reads like hate literature about northern England, but certain other (brief) passages are tinged with Jack's nostalgia for childhood outings with his brother in the countryside around the town. There's a sense in the novel that a more civilized, less mean-spirited England once existed but has now been consumed by a cabal of gangsters, bent coppers, avaricious politicians, and a middle-class obsessed with climbing the social ladder. The spirit of this older, better England is personified by Jack's brother. Frank is dead when the novel begins, but in a brilliant bit of writing Lewis lets us know all about him with a description of the contents of his living room bookcase; his tastes in magazines, books and music are an eloquent testimony to a sober, decent character who was too good and too old-fashioned for his place and time. As Jack investigates Frank's death it becomes even more clear that he was the odd man out in a town given over to self-interest and viciousness, and Jack's attempt to solve and avenge Frank's murder becomes an attempt to reclaim some small part of the innocence he once shared with his brother.

The literary step-parents of Get Carter are Alan Sillitoe and Harold Pinter. Jack's misanthropic descriptions of the town are an echo of the anger Sillitoe brought to his novels and short stories set in the north. Sillitoe had more sympathy for his characters, trapped as they were in dead end jobs and dreary housing estates, and he was more concerned with showing the social and political facts that produced depressed lives and dreary communities. Get Carter's terse, elliptical, and allusive dialogue is pure Pinter. Jack's chats with his fellow gangsters usually have a neutral and pleasant tone but underneath it all they're straining to express violence, rage and naked threats. It's a unique way to create tension, and it's a device that was developed further by Brit crime writer Bill James in his long-running Harpur & Iles series.

So, how far does the book differ from the film, you ask? Not that much, really. The plot was streamlined for the film, and scriptwriter/director Mike Hodges did a wonderful job of choosing what to cut and compress. In a few places the film actually does a better job than the novel; Jack's famous line in the film when he meets Cliff Brumby ("You're a big man, but you're in bad shape. With me it's a full time job. Now behave yourself") is a tweaked improvement over the dialogue from the book. Hodges also made a wise decision to tone down some of the violence aimed at the female characters. Ted Lewis wrote two other Jack Carter novels, Jack Carter's Law and Jack Carter and the Mafia Pigeon, both of which are also being reissued.

Film Review: Billion Dollar Brain (1967)

In the 1960s it was all about the spies: spies on TV, spies at the movies, and spy novels by the bushel. Harry Saltzman, not content with co-producing the James Bond films, bought the rights to Len Deighton's spy novels and made three of them featuring Michael Caine as British agent Harry Palmer. The Palmer character was intended to be the anti-Bond: a spy who was more civil servant than superhero, and whose adventures reflected Cold War realities. The first two films, The Ipcress File and Funeral In Berlin, followed this formula faithfully. The third film, Billion Dollar Brain, went in an altogether different direction. For one thing Ken Russell was hired as the director. Russell had a formidable reputation based on his work at the BBC, but Brain was his first feature. It's clear he wanted to make a big impression.

Billion Dollar Brain sits halfway between being a James Bond spectacular and a gritty, realistic spy story. That's probably the main reason it did poorly at the box office and with the critics. What everyone seems to have missed is that it's a brilliant piece of filmmaking. The fact that it didn't fulfill contemporary genre expectations is beside the point. Brain is simply a celebration of filmmaking magic. The visual exuberance and flair in this film is off the charts. Russell's shot compositon, camera movements, and use of locations is superb. The story is set in Finland in the depths of winter and I can't think of another film that's made winter look so glamorous, so cold and so beautiful. The visuals are matched by the score, which is courtesy of Richard Rodney Bennett. The music manages to suggest icy cold, romance and tension, and it does it in a lush, romantic style that includes the prominent use of a theremin; probably the first time a theremin was used outside of a horror or sci-fi film. All in all, this is one of the best film scores ever.

The plot conerns a deranged Texas billionaire, the wonderfully named General Midwinter, who's bankrolling an anti-Soviet uprising in Latvia. At the heart of his plan is a giant computer designed to co-ordiante the uprising. Karl Malden is Midwinter's point man in Finland, but he's actually skimming every dime Midwinter thinks is going to Latvia. Harry Palmer has to ensure that Midwinter's schemes don't lead to World War III. The story is not meant to be taken seriously. This is first and foremost a satirical look at Cold War fear and paranoia, particularly the kind that was coming out of the US. General Midwinter is a mad character who would be equally at home in Dr. Strangelove. His ranch is the scene of anti-communist rallies that have a certain pre-war German flavour, and his monogram, emblazoned on the side of his oil tankers, is also ominously familiar. Ed Begley gives a great, outsized performance as Midwinter, and the script gives him a score of juicy lines, my favourite being, "My arm is long and my vengeance is total!" The faint whiff of anti-Americanism may well have hurt Brain with US critics. What might have hurt it even more was it's sympathetic portrayal of the Soviets, led by Oscar Homolka as Colonel Stok. In one key scene Stok leaves a performance of The Leningrad Symphony by Shostakovich to meet Palmer. The symphony, which is a tribute to the defenders of Leningrad, has left Stok in tears, and he explains its meaning to a sympathetic Palmer. That's not the kind of conversation Bond ever had with anyone from Smersh.

This is one of those films that has a score of memorable set pieces and scenes, too many to mention, really, but some of the highlights include Palmer being chased through a snowy woods by mounted troops; a primitive wooden ferris wheel turning by the side of a frozen lake; blackmarketeers ambushing a truck; and, most memorably, the demise of Midwinter, which is a direct and clever homage to Sergei Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky. If nothing else, Billion Dollar Brain is the best-looking spy film I can think of, and its sly humour is probably more appreciated today than in 1967. The clip below has the film's opening credits (by the great Maurice Binder) with Bennett's amazing score.