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RARA-AVIS: British HB (long)
A belated follow up to last month's thread on non-American HB
writers... Somebody mentioned the book/film "Get Carter" as a good
British example. Michael Caine, who played the eponymous villain, was
recently interviewed by Michael Bracewell in The Guardian (Weekend
supplement, Feb 8 1997). The film is one of my favourites and I found
the piece below of interest.
Start excerpt >>
British cinema in the Seventies offered James Fox in Performance,
Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange, and Caine in Get Carter: a
triptych of films which, each in different ways, presented the legacy
of the Sixties as psychopathic revenge tragedies. Get Carter (1971),
written and directed by Mike Hodges, took the metropolitan gangster -
the Sixties folk hero, played by Caine - back to the re-invented
northern landscape of the kitchen-sink films of the Fifties
As if by way of acknowledgement, there was even a cameo role for the
playwright John Osborne, playing a lazily sadistic local villain. Get
Carter can be seen as one of the first truly modern films about
Britain, displacing not only the cliches of British social realism
but also the cliches of gangland film-noir. Soaked in matter-of-fact
malevolence and the new brutality of such Seventies TV dramas as The
Sweeney, Get Carter presented realistic violent crime in the cold
light of day, in banal, recognisable settings. For Caine, as an actor
determined m reflect every nuance of ordinariness, the role of Carter
was perfect Indeed, there has seldom been a more menacing
performance
"There was an extraordinary morality in Get Carter, inasmuch as one of
the reasons that Carter is prepared to kill everyone is that
someone's put a person with his surname into a pornographic film. And
that's an incredible moral judgement! But those guys, you see, within
all that working-class gangster system, right through the Mafia, will
follow the principle of protecting your turf and protecting your own.
A gangster, more often than not, is a policeman who's taken the law
into his own hands protecting his family and providing them with a
criminal livelihood. We got an awful lot of stick for the portrayal
of violence in Get Carter. But it was violent only in so far as I
wanted to get across the point that if you whack a bloke eight or ten
times in the face, he isn't going to get up, shake himself down and
come back at you. Just one proper hit in the face and he's going to
be across the room. And you never see that in a lot of films.
"What you get these days, to a greater extent, is a pornography of
violence which is much more dangerous than a pornography of sex. I'd
rater see people screwing each other than killing one another. In Get
Carter, we were criticised because we showed the reality of violence.
But just one stab in the stomach - that's all it takes. I've been a
soldier, I know about the trauma of violence.
<< End quote
Phil Beesley
(not an academic, not a geek either)
**************************************************************
Phil Beesley -- Computer Officer -- Distributed Systems Suppport
University of Leicester
Tel (0)116 252-2231
E-Mail pb14@le.ac.uk
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