John Bull's Glories: 'Get Carter'

Everyone dies in the end. Long before there was "Reservoir Dogs" -- almost, indeed, before there was Quentin Tarantino -- there was Mike Hodges' understated and atmospheric 1971 thriller "Get Carter."

From the opening shot in which Michael Caine -- the eponymous gangland killer -- stares silently out over a London nightscape from a lone-lit penthouse; all the way to the final scene in which he meets his end with such jarring suddenness on a windswept deserted beach, "Get Carter" is a moody poem of a movie.

Its plot unfurls like a flower -- so delicately that a moment's inattention can bruise the petal of scene, yet colorful enough that even watched with half an eye the momentum pulls the viewer forward.

Jack Carter's brother is dead. And for the moment, that is all he, and we, know. He goes to Newcastle for the funeral -- and for revenge, which cuts a bloody swathe through his brother's seedy underworld associates, not to mention a few casually bumped-off bystanders.

In 1971, when "Get Carter" was made, Britain was on the brink of an era of tremendous social upheaval. Through the kind of chronological thaumaturgy that so often proceeds from the effort to map cultural phenomena to the arbitrary dictates of the calendar, much of what we think of as the 1960s there actually didn't happen until the '70s.

True, the "birds" -- including an extremely decorative but otherwise rather pointless Britt Ekland -- do sport big hair, thick mascara and mini-skirts, but the dodgy-even-to-gangsters business that gets Carter's brother killed is porn -- that staple of old school post-war villains like the Krays. Ten years later, it would have been drugs.

Even London had only just begun to swing, and Newcastle wasn't even swaying a little bit. You can tell from the stifling suburban ordinariness of the homes of the gangsters: Though the head hood owns a large country house -- and like Carter, a collection of finely tailored wide-lapelled suits -- he and his men are sat in some back parlor, playing cards.

The movie boasts a shoal of the kind of fine character actors that Britain is justly famous for producing en masse, but whose individual identities seem to swim just beyond the mouth of memory's harbor.

But it is dominated by its star. Carter is arguably Michael Caine's finest creation.

In the '60s, he had portrayed Harry Palmer -- the short-sighted and put-upon British spy from the novels of Len Deighton -- in a trilogy of movies beginning with the sinister, complex "Ipcress File" in 1965 and finishing with Ken Russell's gloriously campy "Billion Dollar Brain" two years later.

Palmer -- with his black-rimmed NHS spectacles, cooking talent and propensity for being roughed up by the bad guys -- is a sort of anti-Bond. And the world he moves in is murky and morally complex -- it's rarely obvious right away who the good guys are. But despite the ambiguity and the touches of British underdog, Palmer is a classic movie hero: He does the right thing (once he's figured out what it is), has the best wisecracks and gets the girl.

Jack Carter is an altogether different kind of fellow. A steel-hearted killer, passionless -- save for brief outbursts of temper -- even in pursuit of his own brother's murderers.

"Get Carter" is a kind of stylistic fossil: No one would dream of making a movie that looked remotely like it today.

Watching it now underlines the degree to which what we think of as cinematic realism, which surely ought to be permanent, fixed and immutable, is rather -- in (excuse the phrase) reality -- the opposite: contingent, evolving, flexible.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the film's violence. "Get Carter" is utterly devoid of the cinematic techniques that today define movie violence. It has none of the dubbed-in sound of bat-on-bone that Spielberg and his progeny later borrowed from the "Chop Socky" school of Chinese-language martial arts movies; none of the balleticized, choreographed and slo-mo friendly fistfight extravaganzas which were then the sole province of the musical (think "West Side Story"); none of the screen-splattering special effects gore that, pace Peckinpah, has become mandatory for any movie which aspires to be, or even contain, action.

These tricks and tropes now masquerade as realism, but in fact they glamorize and fetishize violence.

By contrast, the violence in "Get Carter" is low key, almost offhand. He chases one of the men he believes involved in his brother's murder -- and corners him in a multistory car park. But when he punches him, there are no satisfying, crunchy sound effects -- just a fit, young man beating a fat, old one. And when he casually pitches the guy over the side of the building, there is no fast cut editing of the falling body to whet the expectation -- just the smashed bonnet of a car and the broken and (by contemporary standards daintily) bloodied body in the street.

One footnote: "Get Carter" was re-made in 2000, starring Sylvester Stallone. I have not seen the re-make. There is some kind of ineluctable principle of cinematic thermodynamics that determines that all re-makes are bad. Not just worse than the original, but flat-out bad.

(John Bull's Glories is an occasional column reflecting on the significance and appeal of British pop culture artifacts, which may be obscure to the American reader.)