Get Carter. 1971. Directed by Mike Hodges.

(2/5/01)

I saw this film almost a month ago (January 15) and just hadn't gotten around to writing about it. It's a mean, tough movie about a man involved in the underworld who believes his brother has been murdered and comes to find the killers.

What he discovers is that his niece--the brother's daughter--had been involved in the making of a porn film. The brother had discovered this, made trouble and been murdered in consequence. Carter learns the truth, kills those involved (or has some of them kill each other, according to the program note) and is himself killed at the end.

Get Carter is certainly dated. That's not necessarily a bad thing--it has the flavor of its time. There is a scene at a disco which locates the film in time. There is the kind of explicit love scenes (or sex scenes) that were so prevalent in those days. And then there is that fascination with pornography which was also an aspect of the time. When we first see Jack Carter he is with a group of his colleagues watching sexually explicit slides--of all things. Carter makes an erotic phone call to a girl friend played by Britt Ekland and there is some raunchy humor including (to the best of my recollection) men deprived of their clothes being seen by a parade of schoolgirls.

Michael Caine is fascinating to watch as Carter. He is impeccably dressed, well-mannered, soft-spoken--and then suddenly there is this raw brutality. He reminds me of James Bond, especially in his Roger Moore incarnation, although Moore seems more upper-class than Michael Caine, especially when we see him in the industrial milieu he comes from.

It's a very unpleasant revenge film and it left a bad taste in my mouth. I especially remembered the ending in which Carter lets the man who (I think) did the actual killing of his brother run from him until he is exhausted and can't run any more. Then he forces him to drink a whole bottle of whiskey and smashes his head with a blunt instrument. At the beginning of the film the act of avenging the brother seems just, but Carter doesn't seem just in that scene. It is like his anger or hatred has taken him over and turned him into something inhuman. What he did to that man didn't seem right--or didn't feel right--and I was glad when he was shot down right afterwards.

The film was also interesting as a picture of a rough industrial area. The print was hard to hear and I missed a lot of the dialogue and consequently had a hard time following it.

Black Rainbow. 1988. Directed by Mike Hodges.

(1/29/01)

This film is strikingly similar to Night Has a Thousand Eyes, which I haven't seen in many years. It is about a phony spiritualist who starts to genuinely see disturbing events in the future.

I love watching Rosanna Arquette. I saw her some years ago in a film called Open All Night and in both cases I really responded to her. I waould definitely like to see more of her films from around this time. She has a presence and a sex appeal that really grab me. And of course it is a pleasure to watch a fine actor like Jason Robards.

I didn't really care for the film as a whole. Arquette sees into the future of a criminal conspiracy and this endangers her. But the conspiracy is not explained well; I was confused about what was going on.

The whole last part of the film is very confusing. Martha goes unconscious or into a trance and appears as an apparition. A killer sent to eliminate her sees the apparition, shoots at it and kills her father instead. Ten years later the reporter who had been involved with her tracks her down, but she won't talk to him and when pictures he takes of her are developed there is no image of her. So we are left to ponder what it all means.

I think that one point of all this is that by faking being a medium Martha inadvertently draws these events to her. It's sort of like the stories of people who have played with Ouija boards and have contacted something. It was like she invited the visions which came to her.

The great moment, the one moment I remember from the film, comes when Martha is doing her spiritualist act and is describing a supposedly dead person to his wife. She has the name right, but the woman protests, "But my husband's alive" and Marth asuddenly exclaims, "No, he's not." When she makes other prophecies it doesn't have the same impact. But when she is descibing another dead person and realizes she is talking about her own father, that is also riveting.

I liked a lot of the exterior photography of the South. Railroads figure prominently in this film as a means of transportation and the pictures of trains are kind of haunting.