The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘Get Carter? I was certain no reputable actor would do it’
Mike Hodges broke the mould of British film, with a hand from Michael Caine
To be clear, a producer did not pull a loaded gun on Mike Hodges on the set of the Omen sequel. It actually happened in an office, during an argument over the film’s budget. And, as Hodges recalls today, 45 years on, “he didn’t actually aim it at me. He just withdrew it from his bag and pointedly laid it on the desk.”
“I asked him what he meant by it, and he said he’d love to shoot me, but couldn’t, because there would be consequences,” he explains over Zoom from his home in rural Dorset. “So I really was having a nasty old time of it.”
Back then, Hodges was hot property: the gifted, ambitious director and screenwriter of Get Carter, who had gone to make his mark in America. Arguably, it would have been in Hollywood’s own best interests to help him, since his revolutionary British gangland thriller, released in 1971, had marked him out as one of his generation’s most promising talents. Instead, even when he wasn’t being menaced with a firearm, his enigmatic, often unclassifiable work was regularly received by the business with suspicion and bafflement.
Of course, his uproarious 1980 take on Flash Gordon thrived, and will continue to do so for as long as shining space palaces, epic laser battles and Brian Blessed in leather underpants all count as great entertainment. Yet many of his best films were all but buried on release.
That is what makes Hodges’s forthcoming BFI retrospective doubly vital. Titled Return of the Outsider, and running throughout May, it brings all nine of his features back to the cinema, including a new 4K restoration of Get Carter, as well as his Bafta-winning 1994 miniseries Dandelion Dead and a number of other television projects.
Film was his first love. He was born in Bristol in 1932, the son of “a nice conservative middle-class West Country couple” who had tried to nudge him towards a career in accountancy. Growing up in Salisbury in the 1940s, however, he lost himself in the films of Billy Wilder and Elia Kazan at the city’s three cinemas. But TV gave him his break. His first job was as a teleprompter operator on live productions such as The Billy Cotton Band Show, while on his days off, he wrote scripts.
He moved into producing and documentary-making and found a niche in Sunday afternoon arts programming – “just before the God slot, so nobody really gave a stuff what you did”. Well, up to a point. A jaggedly experimental 1967 episode of the culture show New Tempo titled Information Explosion had the ITV switchboard jammed with complaints from viewers who had expected something more conducive to an after-lunch snooze.
His artful approach to the 1968 children’s series The Tyrant King – which he shot around London on 16mm film, rather than in a studio on magnetic tape – led to a couple of episodes on ITV’s drama strand
Playhouse, which in turn caught the eye of Michael Klinger, a film producer looking for someone to adapt and direct Jack’s Return Home, a bracingly bleak underworld page-turner set in (an unnamed) Scunthorpe.
“I said yes in January and we were shooting
Get Carter by July,” Hodges tells me. “How we got it together that quickly
I’ll never know.” In adapting the novel, he moved the action to Newcastle – a city that he had come to know during his national service as a Royal Navy minesweeper, gliding in and out of east coast fishing towns. “Those places opened my eyes to how tough life in Britain could be,” he says. “It knocked all the rough edges off me – or rather the smooth ones.”
When Klinger told him he had secured Michael Caine for the title role of a violent gangster seeking to avenge his brother’s death, Hodges was astonished. “I honestly thought no reputable actor would want to play the bastard,” he hoots, pointing out that films such as Zulu, The Ipcress File, Alfie, Gambit and The Italian Job had collectively buffed Caine’s star image to a silvery gleam. “But Michael had done his research. He knew what he wanted to do.”
He remembers filming Caine’s arrival in a Newcastle pub, “and looking through the camera at his face filling the shot in close-up, and realising that I was making a different film than the one I’d thought. Michael brought such a stature to the role. He made him bearable.”
Overseeing the new restoration, parts of Caine’s performance still took him aback: “That look when the car is shunted into the water with the woman in the boot, where you can tell he knows he’s sick. Or that moment on the ferry where he smiles at the children with their mother and you realise he can never have that life.”
Hodges was not consulted – or paid – during the making of the illadvised Sylvester Stallone-led remake from 2000 and was crestfallen when he heard Caine cropped up in a cameo role. He still hasn’t seen it, though his son from his first marriage (which ended in 1982; he has since remarried) brought him back a DVD copy from Hong Kong as a joke, but it wouldn’t play, so found its way into the bin. “I’m told it was terrible,” Hodges says.
The original Get Carter was such an artistic and commercial success that Hodges, Caine and Klinger vowed to work together again straight away. They initially considered a project called The Limey,a comic thriller dreamt up by Klinger as a Caine vehicle (and unrelated to the 1999 Steven Soderbergh film of the same title), but Hodges didn’t fancy it. Instead, he cooked up a screenplay of his own: Pulp, a Malta-set sunburned comic noir, in which Caine played a tacky novelist roped in to ghostwrite the memoirs of a faded actor with mob ties.
“It got terrific reviews but the distribution company didn’t know what the hell to do with it,” Hodges explains. “So it just vanished. I’ve had rather bad luck on that front.” His fortunes didn’t improve with 1974’s The Terminal Man, a nervy, unsettling Michael Crichton adaptation, which went unreleased in the