In 1971’s Get Carter, he’s a thug with the London mob whose his brother up North just died in car wreck after downing a bottle of scotch. Problem is, his brother didn’t drink scotch. Carter, played by Caine as a very smart, very evil man, wants answers.
You could go anywhere with that setup, a reality acknowledged by showing Carter reading a Raymond Chandler novel on the northbound train. Here, the film goes for the slow burn. Carter doesn’t know what happened to his brother, but he’s willing to us his nose for lies and his comfort with aggression to find out and seek revenge. Most of the film, consequently, is a detective story with a very bad man as the detective. As we piece together the circumstances of the mysterious death along with our protagonist, we find ourselves weighing various possibilities, trying to stay ahead of the players, wondering what’ll happen next.
Anchoring all this is, of course, Michael Caine. He invests us in his self-described villain through the force of his personality and makes us actually care about whether this murdering thug lives or dies. It’s a remarkable performance, and yet another indication why Caine is one of the finest screen actors of his or any generation.
Though Caine anchors the film, Get Carter is about more than Caine. It’s about a grimy, bleak, sullenly desperate time and place and the people who live there. It’s about men and woman who’ll do anything to get what they think they want. It’s about a fatalistic world-weariness that breathes, “Yeah, mum and dad beat the Nazis. And I’m stuck here.” The film’s look and style reflect this attitude, and they make Caine a fish that swims very easily in these murky waters. Get Carter doesn’t rush to conclusions and it doesn’t care for fast talkers. It just has Caine, a hard man in a hard part of town looking to punish some hard people.
And when he does, look out. This is one bad dude.
