Get Carter’s great escape from MGM mogul’s demand to cast American stars and ditch Caine
MICHAEL CAINE and the British film industry dodged a bullet when Hollywood bosses tried to fire him from Get Carter – and replace him with Steve Mcqueen, a book has revealed.
London-based Michael Klinger had snapped up the rights to the 1970 novel Jack’s Return Home, which the film was based on, for £10,000 – the equivalent of £160,000 today.
But the film needed American dollars to get made – and MGM was on the lookout for low-budget films because of a cash crisis.
Written by former Yellow Submarine animator Ted Lewis, from Barton-on-Humber, near Hull, the book was set in Scunthorpe, but director Mike Hodges chose to shoot in Newcastle.
Co-stars included future Coronation Street favourite Brian Mosley as gangster Cliff Brumby. Playwright John Osborne was to make a rare screen appearance as crime lord Kinnear.
The cameras were ready to roll when Klinger was summoned to the US for a last-minute meeting with MGM president James Aubrey. “His nickname was the Smiling Cobra,” Klinger told author Nick Triplow for his biography of Ted Lewis, Getting Carter.
“His idea was the tough guy part, the John Osborne part, should be Edward G
Robinson, which went down like a lead balloon.
“At the dinner before they started filming, he said, ‘Why don’t we get Steve Mcqueen in the Michael Caine role?’ He didn’t get his way and got very upset.” He also wanted Kojak star Telly Savalas instead of Mosley.
Two years later MGM remade Jack’s Return Home as the thriller Hit Man with an all-american cast including Pam Grier. It bombed at the box office.
Ted appeared in the credits but said he never “received a penny” in royalties.
He died in 1982, aged 42, of alcohol-related causes.
The Ted Lewis Exhibition Centre opened in Barton this month after seven years of fundraising.