The Elephant to Hollywood - Michael Caine [63]
Get Carter is the complete antithesis of films such as The Italian Job, with its larky criminals who get beaten up and appear in the next scene with barely a scratch on them. The only film I had ever seen (as a kid growing up in the Elephant) that seemed to me to give a halfway realistic portrait of gangland life was Brighton Rock, the Boulting brothers’ film of Graham Greene’s novel, starring Richard Attenborough. Michael Klinger and I were determined to achieve at least as convincing a portrait as that.
Realistic portraits of gangland life require gritty settings and so Michael Klinger, Mike Hodges and I decided to shoot the film in Newcastle upon Tyne. Once a great shipbuilding town, it had long since fallen into decline and gave us exactly the dark and brooding atmosphere of urban decay we were looking for. Many people have taken Get Carter as a Western, and we were certainly aiming for that sense of a wild frontier. As for me, I wanted the challenge of creating a real villain. Up until Get Carter I’d more or less always played nice characters – even Alfie is nice in his way, a real charmer – but Jack Carter is a cold, cold man.
People often think that Get Carter is a film about vengeance, but it’s not: it’s about honour, family honour. I understood all that, because there was a very strong code of honour round where I came from. It was a bit like Sicily: you kissed a girl and the brothers came round and you had to get married the following Saturday or you would besmirch the family name – and you wouldn’t get away with that. I was in a club somewhere in the West End just after Get Carter was released and the gangster I’d based Jack Carter on – not that he ever knew it – came up to me and said, ‘I saw that Get Carter, Michael.’ Uh-oh, I thought, but I kept a dead straight face and I said, ‘Did you?’ and he went on, ‘Biggest load of crap I’ve ever seen.’ ‘Really?’ I said, looking round for the exit. ‘What makes you think that?’ And he said, ‘Michael, you weren’t married, you never had any kids and you had no responsibilities. You don’t understand why we do things. I had to keep a wife and kids with no special skills.’ And I thought – no special skills? He’d only killed about five people – not that he’d ever been charged with anything, but everyone knew . . . and I said, ‘Oh, blimey – you’re right. That was a terrible mistake.’ I completely agreed with everything he said. You don’t want to argue with someone like that.
Violence has consequences and you don’t often see that in movies. It’s a sort of pornography: people are struck time and time again and the next time they appear they just sport a bit of Elastoplast, not even a black eye or missing teeth. If you were a real victim of the violence you see in some films, you would be in hospital or dead. In Get Carter you see the effect of one whack, although we never cut to the gore. I’m worried by the sorts of computer games kids play these days when their characters smash someone over the head and there’s no blood – what sort of a generation are we bringing up? And I’m amazed at what you can see on television even before the watershed. People seem to glory in it and that scares me.
9
Falling in Love
Get Carter was followed very swiftly by Kidnapped – a dud from the very start and the only film I’ve never been paid for. I couldn’t wait to get back to London from location in Scotland, but when I finally got home, I was in a very poor way. I was drinking and