Review for Get Carter Limited Edition

Introduction

It happens very rarely, and even less so as we get older, but sometimes you watch a movie that just moves into your head and lives there, rent free for the rest of your life. It has such a visceral and deep impact, that you’ll wind up thinking about it at the most unlikely times, little scenes, odd quotes playing in your mind when you least expect it. Several years ago, I caught a broadcast of the original Get Carter late one night, and I had seen nothing like it before, or indeed since. The next day I was on Napster, looking for the Roy Budd soundtrack (this was before file-sharing was criminalised), and every time that mp3 came up on my randomised playlist, I’d be transported back to grotty, 1970s Newcastle once more.


You’d think that such a meaningful movie in my life would have long since been part of my collection, but I’ve held off buying it this long. For its US release, it was felt that Americans would have difficulty understanding strong colloquial British accents, even cockney, and ADR was applied to ‘soften’ some of them. Even in the UK, it was a matter of pot luck whether you’d get the redub or the original version on DVD and on Blu-ray, so I held off. But in 2022, the BFI gave Get Carter a 4k restoration supervised by director Mike Hodges, and released the film on Limited Edition Blu-ray and on UHD (It also got a standard UHD release earlier this year). I bought it on day one, but that Blu-ray has been in my to-watch pile, until I felt in the right place to watch Get Carter again.


Jack Carter is a London gangster, but now he has to go to Newcastle for his brother Frank’s funeral. He also wants to find out just why and how his brother died. But no one wants Jack Carter in Newcastle, least of all his own gang lest he asks questions. And Carter is asking questions...

The Disc

Get Carter gets a 1.85:1 widescreen 1080p transfer with the choice between PCM 1.0 Mono English and DD 2.0 Mono English Audio Descriptive with optional SDH English subtitles. The transfer is impeccable, clear and sharp, full of detail with excellent contrast, and free of signs of age and print damage or visible compression. Get Carter is an incredibly visual film, with evocative cinematography and stylish direction, and the grimy Newcastle of the early seventies is very much a character in the film. Roy Budd’s iconic score is sparsely but very effectively used. The audio is fine, the dialogue is clear, although the volume levels are very low, and I had my home cinema at 70% where I usually keep it at 30%, 50% for Dolby Atmos.

Extras

You get two discs in a BD Amaray style case, one on a centrally hinged panel. There are also four postcards in the Amaray case. On Disc 1 you’ll find the following extras.

Introduction to the film from Michael Caine (2:31)
Audio Commentary with Mike Hodges, Michael Caine, and Wolfgang Suschitzky
Audio Commentary with Barry Forshaw and Kim Newman
Isolated Score by Roy Budd (PCM 1.0)


Disc 2

Mike Hodges in Conversation (60:13)
Klinger on Klinger (24:09)
Don’t Trust Boys (21:53)
The Sound of Roy Budd (17:07)
BBC Look North location report (4:48)


The Ship Hotel – Tyne Main (33:26)
Michael Caine’s message to premiere attendees (0:46)
Roy Budd Plays ‘Get Carter’ (3:39)
International Trailer (2:40)
Rerelease Trailer (1:30)
Script Gallery


The Amaray case slips in a rigid card slipcase with a strong card blurb sheet on the back which you can try and remove to store in the case, but it will only get distorted and stuck. Also in the case, you’ll find a reversible, foldout poster, and an 80-page booklet with writing on the film from Mark Kermode, Tim Pelan, John Oliver and Jason Wood and more.

Conclusion

Get Carter is as pure cinema as you can get. It’s a breathtakingly visual film, a film anorexic when it comes to exposition, and absent any back-story. It makes it a film that you have to be present for, a story you experience alongside the title character, all of which makes it so much more emotionally effective and shocking. It’s a stunning film, which hasn’t diminished one iota in over fifty years.


You can see in the extras how Get Carter was a riposte to decades of British gangster movies that portrayed career criminals as cheeky chappies, as comedic interludes, villains with hearts of gold, not at all comparable to the reality at the time of people like The Krays. Hollywood didn’t have that problem; all they had to do was cast Lee Marvin in a role and you knew there weren’t going to be any chuckles to be had.


This was Mike Hodges’ first theatrical feature, and he was coming from a background in documentaries, and Michael Caine had grown up aware of the reality of British organised crime. Get Carter was brutally realistic, its moments of violence were short and painful, its characters were small and nasty, and Carter was as brutal as any of them. That it was familial loyalty that spurred him to discover what happened to his brother, and then seek vengeance on those responsible, rebelling against his own gang to do so, made him an attractive antihero, but eventually even his brutality gets out of hand. He’s as much a psychopath as anyone else in this film.


Yet I can’t help but root for him, and share in his vicarious joy as he achieves his goals, which makes the conclusion of the film all the more effective. It’s no doubt why the film refuses to leave my consciousness even after all these years of having first seen it. This Blu-ray release merely cements it further. BFI’s presentation is excellent when it comes to the transfer, lavish when it comes to the extra features and luxurious when it comes to the packaging and the physical bonuses. A must own film that should be on every shelf; and this way, you’re certain not to get that overdubbed version.