9 / 10
A Train North
Jack Carter sits on a train out of London reading Farewell, My Lovely, and the landscape outside turns from green fields to smokestacks and slag heaps. He’s a gangster, he works for a pair of London bosses, and he’s going home to Newcastle to bury his brother Frank, who died drunk at the wheel of a car that went off a quay. Carter doesn’t believe it.
Nobody in Newcastle wants him there. His bosses in London want him back. The local villains want him gone. He doesn’t care. He’s going to find out who killed his brother, and he’s going to kill them.
The plot doesn’t get more complicated than that. Mike Hodges, directing his first feature, adapted it from Ted Lewis’s novel Jack’s Return Home, and he stripped it down to a cold, straight line.
Michael Caine
Caine was already a star, the charming Cockney of Alfie and The Italian Job, and he threw all of that away for this. Carter is cold, cruel and utterly without charm. He’s polite in a way that frightens people. He sleeps with women and discards them. He hurts people who get in his way and kills them when he has to, and he never raises his voice.
It’s one of Caine’s greatest performances, and it’s a brave one. He doesn’t ask you to like Carter, and you don’t. You follow him because he’s the most dangerous man in every room, and you want to see who he goes through next.
There’s one moment where the mask slips, when Carter watches a pornographic film and realises the girl in it is his teenage niece, Doreen, who might be his own daughter. Tears run down his face. Then he gets up and goes to kill the people responsible.
For Writers
Carter watches a pornographic film, recognises his niece and weeps. It’s the only moment of feeling he shows in the whole film, and it tells the audience everything about why he’s doing this.
A cold character needs one crack. Without it, readers can’t connect with them at all. With it, every cold act that follows carries the weight of that single moment of feeling. The crack gives the coldness a reason, and the character stays just as hard.
Find the one moment where your hard character’s guard drops. Keep it short and private, with no one else to see it. Then let them go straight back to being hard, and let the reader carry the memory of what they saw.
Newcastle
The film was shot in Newcastle and Gateshead, and the city is a character in its own right: terraced streets, smoky pubs, betting shops, coal-blackened beaches and the huge concrete Trinity Square car park, where one of the film’s most famous killings takes place. Wolfgang Suschitzky’s photography makes it look grey, wet and exhausted.
This isn’t swinging London. It’s the industrial north in decline, and it’s the right place for a story about corruption rotting a town from the inside. The car park was demolished in 2010, and locals sold off chunks of it as souvenirs. That tells you how much the film means up there.
For Writers
The film uses Newcastle’s decaying industrial landscape to mirror the moral decay of its characters. The setting does the thematic work.
Ask what your setting says about your theme. If the answer is nothing, move the scene somewhere that speaks. A confession in a hospital car park at three in the morning reads differently from the same confession over lunch, and the reader will feel the difference without being told.
Setting can carry theme better than dialogue. A story about corruption feels more corrupt in a crumbling city. A story about loneliness feels lonelier in an empty landscape. Choose settings that reflect your story’s inner life, and describe them with the same care you’d give a character.
The Villains
The Newcastle underworld is a rogues’ gallery of sleaze. Ian Hendry plays Eric Paice, a chauffeur and fixer who used to know Carter in London and hates him, and their scenes crackle with old contempt. John Osborne, the playwright, plays Cyril Kinnear, the soft-spoken local boss who runs porn films and card games from a country house. Bryan Mosley plays Cliff Brumby, a slot-machine king who gets on the wrong side of Carter.
Nobody in this film is decent. The businessmen are crooks, the crooks are worse and the women are used and discarded by all of them. It’s one of the bleakest pictures of British society ever made, and Hodges doesn’t soften any of it.
Carter Kills Like Paperwork
The violence is brief, sudden and ugly. There are no shootouts in slow motion, no choreographed fights. A man is thrown off the top of the car park. A woman is locked in a car boot, and the car is pushed into the river. Carter forces Eric to drink a bottle of whisky, the way his brother was forced to, and then beats him to death on a coal-black beach.
It shocked audiences in 1971, and it still has an edge. Hodges films it plainly, from a distance, and the matter-of-factness is worse than any gore. Carter kills the way other men fill in paperwork.
The Beach
The ending takes place on a coal-strewn beach at the edge of the North Sea. Carter has killed Eric and throws the shotgun into the water. He walks along the shore, and a sniper hired by his enemies, who’s been following him the whole film, shoots him dead. The body lies on the beach as the tide comes in.
No triumph, no escape. Carter gets his revenge and dies for it on a filthy beach, and the waves wash the coal over him. British film has few better endings. It’s perfect. There was never going to be a way out for a man like this.
For Writers
Carter gets his revenge and is killed on a coal-covered beach, alone, by a man he never sees. The film denies him any triumph.
Write two endings for your revenge story, one where your hero wins and one where they pay. Read both and ask which one tells the truth about the world you’ve built. The victorious ending is usually the comfortable one, and comfortable endings are easily forgotten.
Revenge stories often end with the avenger victorious. Denying that ending can be far more powerful, because it asks what revenge really costs. If your character has lived by violence, consider letting the violence come back for them, from a direction they never saw coming.
Roy Budd
Roy Budd’s theme, played on harpsichord, tabla and double bass, belongs with the best film music of the seventies, tense, hypnotic and a little eerie. It plays over the opening train ride and sets the tone before a word is spoken.
The music has lived on in adverts, samples and other films, and it’s instantly recognisable to anybody who’s seen the film. It’s become a crime-film standard.
Legacy
Get Carter was barely noticed on release and dismissed by some critics as nasty. Over the years, it became the template for British crime cinema, from The Long Good Friday to Guy Ritchie’s films, and it regularly tops lists of the best British films ever made.
Hollywood remade it in 2000 with Sylvester Stallone, and it was a disaster, a loud, slick, pointless film that missed everything cold and grim about the original. Caine even turned up in it. Don’t bother with it.
The Flaws
Some of the supporting performances are stiff, the plot gets tangled in the middle, and the film’s treatment of women, while true to Carter’s world, can be hard to watch. It’s cold enough that some viewers find it hard to care about anybody.
Get Carter is the best British gangster film ever made, with Michael Caine at his most frightening and an ending that still lands like a punch.
Craft Note
Craft Note
Get Carter gives its audience a protagonist with no redeeming qualities except loyalty to his dead brother, and makes him fascinating anyway through menace, competence and one moment of grief.
Readers will follow a cold, cruel protagonist if he’s the most capable person in every scene and has one clear, human motive. They don’t need to like him. They need to be unable to look away.
If your protagonist is unlikable, give them a single, understandable motive and make them better at what they do than anyone around them. Readers will follow competence into dark places.
The Beach Waits
Absolutely. It’s a 9: the coldest, grimmest and best British gangster film ever made, with Michael Caine at his most dangerous, a grey, dying Newcastle and an ending on a coal-black beach you won’t forget. Skip the remake.
Frequently Asked Questions
This film appears on 2 of my film lists