Muttonchops

Get Carter. Directed by Mike Hodges. Starring Michael Caine, Ian Hendry, Britt Ekland, and John Osbourne.

Get Carter is a bleak thriller, and definitely well worth watching. Director Mike Hodges has a bleak, almost nihilistic vision that makes the oeuvre of Quentin Tarantino look as tame as an animated film by Walt Disney. Unlike Tarantino, the violence isn’t just played for laughs. This is a revenge flick, where the death of a brother and the corruption of a niece up’s the ante, dramatically speaking, in a way that Tarantino has never really been able to pull off, anal rape notwithstanding.

The clothes worn by the men and women in Get Carter are stunning. However, the well tailored suits and nothing left to the imagination mini-skirts stand in stark contrast to the perpetual bad hair day every man in this film seems to be having. Despite the at times comical hairstyles on display, this is one bleak thriller worth watching.

If I didn’t have a plasma screen, I don’t think I would have noticed how the uniformly bleak urban landscape plays off the sharp sense of individuation that each characters clothes and hairstyle bring to the film's visual palette. How good are plasma screens? In any medium close up of Michael Caine , his sideburns were in such desperate need of a trim I couldn’t focus on anything else in the picture.

The score was also surprisingly good, at least when compared to other films of the period. The jazz sounds like…jazz, and not the sound audiences in the aught aughts have come to associate with parodies of period pornography. The rock sounds like rock, and not some old jazz guy’s idea of what rock sounds like.

All in all, Get Carter is a very slick little production. I’ve been watching a lot of Japanese action movies from the seventies, but after seeing Get Carter (as well as The Wicker Man a few months ago) I’m going to make a point of putting more British films from the seventies in the Netflix queue.