Commentary on a seminal Michael Caine movie, "Get Carter"....
It's obvious that Carter is being clocked from the moment he walks into a bar across the street from the train station. A Land Rover full of men tails him as he books a room at a bed and breakfast and then visits his brother's tawdry little terrace house, where the dead man lies in his coffin alone until his brother arrives to sit vigil overnight before the funeral, shaving with his electric razor over the open casket.We meet what little family Carter has: there's his niece Doreen (Petra Markham), who may or may not be Carter's daughter after a brief affair with Frank's (now long gone) wife. And there's Margaret (Dorothy White), Frank's girlfriend, an unapologetic tart who claims that Frank got drunk and made a scene after she told him she wasn't going to leave her husband, just before driving his car into the Tyne.And then there's the extended criminal "family" in which Carter is a member in good standing. There's Albert (Glynn Edwards), an old friend, and Eric (Ian Hendry), an old enemy, as well as Con (George Sewell) and Peter the Dutchman (Tony Beckley), two colleagues from London sent by the Fletchers to bring him back home.There's Cliff Brumby, a local businessman who dominates the slot machine business in the city, a semi-criminal who hides behind the façade of a seedy but technically legal business. Tailing Eric from the Newcastle Racecourse leads Carter to Cyril Kinnear, the big boss of the city's criminal underworld, played with bloodless menace by playwright John Osborne (Look Back in Anger, The Entertainer, as well as the screenplahttps://freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/4317605/postsys for Tom Jones and The Charge of the Light Brigade). By the time the picture is over Carter will kill most of them."
