MICHAEL CAINE GET CARTER

Back in 1971 I saw Michael Caine's film, GET CARTER. By then, the theater in Charleston that showed foreign films, The Arcade, had closed because the European films were rated X in the new rating system. The owner of the theater would not show X rated movies. They started showing drive-in type movies and shut down. Another theater that had shut down was showing black hit-man/drug-dealer films and Hong Kong kung fu movies where they jump up in the air, twirl and land on their feet. It was the only operating movie theater in the city at the time. The movie theaters all went to the suburban shopping malls. I developed an ironic liking for these truly cheezy flicks, the lowest budgets ever. Occasionally, one odd film would appear, like Marlon Brando's BURN, a "western" on a Caribbean island. Brando made some cheezy films. He wasn't always Stanley Kowalski and Captain Kurtz. I think he was some kind of sentimentalist for authenticity when he was allowed to make his own films. They came across about like Steven Seagal films in the wild west of guns, horses and whips. GET CARTER was one of the the films that came to this theater while it was showing low-budget black hit-man flicks. It was a shock to see what to me was an art film among made-for-drive-in blood-letters.


I had heard nothing about the film. My friend who kept up with movie reviews had never seen any mention of it. I went and was floored by what a great film it was. It was one that belonged at the "art house" theater, which wasn't available. Next day I told my friends who loved good films about it, saying, "it's a sleeper." I wondered how one of the best films of the year got buried among the worst. The corporate world doesn't know the difference. That's how. Over 40 years later, my only recollections of the film were that I liked it a lot at the time and hadn't seen Michael Caine in a better role since. Before, he was in ALFIE, where he got his immediate fame. Watching the film through last night, I noticed when it was over that it had commentary with it. Today I watched it again with director/writer, Mike Hodges, and the photography man, an east European with an amazing eye and a name I can't remember. I looked it up, feeling like he deserves for me to look up his name. First name was Wolfgang. Last name, Suschitzky. And Michael Caine. The visuals held me in awe from first to last. Scene after scene was beautifully conceived and captured.




In the commentary, the director and Caine were saying that it was taken by critics to be too violent in 1971. The critics steered the public away from it. Caine said it was put on the American drive-in circuit where they made their return on it. Like Caine said, it's not that it was too violent; it was not flashy violence, but violence exhibited as it happens out here in the world, making it feel dangerous. Of course, by today's stnadard, the violence is Mickey Mouse Club. During that year or so of watching hit-man movies, I developed a liking for them. One I especially remember, this one in black and white, maybe. The visuals in my memory are black and white. The actor who was the butler or whatever he was on Magnum PI, the tv show. He was the hit-man, and a memorably interesting one. I wouldn't mind seeing it again if I can figure out what it was. I can find the actor's name easily, then look for him on netflix. John Hillerman. I can't find anything about it on his website or wikipedia. This was the time of SUPERFLY and SHAFT with Isaac Hayes singing Theme From Shaft. He did that song right on his album, Live at the Sahara Tahoe. I just now took that down from the shelf to play later. It's one of my all-time favorite albums. It's from the time Isaac was wearing chains. Black Moses.


In GET CARTER, Michael Caine was from Newcastle, England, though in the London mob. His brother in the Newcastle mob turned up dead. Carter goes to Newcastle to find out who did it and to balance the score. He was mad. He found people, one at a time, interrogated them in no undertain terms, learned what he needed to know and went into action. With one guy, you knew before Carter caught him he'd be dead before Carter was done with him. While Carter was interrogating him, saying, "You know that if you don't tell me the truth I'll kill you," the man on his knees said, "I know." This guy was in the homemade film Carter found essentially raping Carter's teenage niece, his brother's girl. It made him even madder. There was no way this guy might survive his encounter with Carter, not even begging. Carter went through the Newcastle mob, one at a time, taking out the ones involved in the homemade film with the girl, and the ones involved in the murder of his brother. Caine kept a straight face throughout the film, allowing us to see his feelings and thoughts very slightly in his eyes. He was mad and he was getting even. He had a good notion he wouldn't make it back to London alive, and didn't care. He did what needed to be done.


While Caine appeared to be emotionless, he was a volcano of emotion. It went off when he used his gun. It went off when he hit somebody to encourage them to talk. I'm not a follower of Michael Caine films, though appreciate him a great deal as an actor when I see him. GET CARTER especially. I felt like this was a tour de force for him, the director, the photographer, the entire production. Caine got his name in ALFIE just a few years before. I don't remember anything about it but that he was in it. He became Alfie. I got it from the commentary with GET CARTER that Caine is noted for becoming the character so seamlessly it's not like he's acting. My memory of the film was not near up to what I saw this time. I'd given it 4 stars on netflix as a movie I'd seen before. Went to netflix today and gave it 5 stars. I loved it that much as a beautifully made film I can see again and again, enjoying more each time. Not many movies do that to me. I love it when it happens.


The film did not age at all. The clothes the lead actors wore work for what people wear today. Much of it was filmed in public places like pubs where you see local people coming and going, living their lives. Only fashions have changed since then.What the majorityof people wear hasn't changed much at all. The film had a good depth of field about it visually, and the story, itself, had a depth of field. It seemed like it could have been made more recently than 40 years ago, though it is a good example of the better films from that time, like BLOW-UP, A MAN AND A WOMAN, THE CONFORMIST, the brooding Russian KING LEAR, same period. Some great films were made in that time of late Sixties, early Seventies. GET CARTER was in there among the better of them. It broke British stereotypes so brazenly that it is contemporary to now when those stereotypes are over.

just before the final scene

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APOCALYPSE NOW AND REDUX

 napalm in the morning smells like victory

I spent 6 hours watching my favorite movie twice. I'd not yet seen Redux. Every time I went to it on netflix it was listed 'long wait.' This time it had no wait signal, so I ordered it, it came, 2 discs, the original and the Redux. I watched Redux first because I wanted so much to see it. Besides, I'd already seen the original half a dozen times. I'd heard Coppola in an interview talk about how the Redux satisfied what he wanted to do with the film. I'm of a different mind. I watched the original immediately after Redux and preferred it. The part in Redux of the French colony up the river added nothing to the story but a long boring section. The part about the centerfold girls after the show was boring. All it added to the story was seeing the girls of the USO show were a bunch of deadbeat junkies. So what. It also added long sequences of Marlon Brando boring me to death. Those three additions only made the movie longer. That's all. They seemed to me to take a movie with the substance of clam chowder and thinned it down to tomato soup.

When it was over, I was ready to see the original to erase Redux from my mind. From the time the original started, it seemed to have a golden glow of clarity around it, the perfectly cut gem. Of course, it was in my mind, not in the film, but it was my mind's response to the film, which, after seeing Redux, was a relief. Even the repeated scenes, all of them, seemed better in the original. For one thing, from scene one, I knew I was seeing the film I love more than any other I've ever seen, though with several close seconds. My aesthetic eye was set to Perfectly Cut Gem as I sat back and enjoyed my favorite movie again. Coppola's decision to ditch those three extraneous scenes that slowed the film down and thinned its substance show me his genius, as well as the completed film itself. Redux showed me Coppola's self-editing eye is a good one. Even if he had help making the decision, he made the final decision, I suppose.

In Redux, Martin Sheen's character bought some deadbeat junkie pussy for two barrels of boat fuel. His character was a little too rational for such a vastly ignorant move. That was something the surfer on the boat might have done, Lance, when he was on lsd. Maybe it was to show Sheen had lost his good senses, but that would have been the only way it showed at that point, and beyond. The French woman later was out of place too. It didn't fit Sheen's character again, and nothing about the entire scene with the French advanced the story. It was Coppola's baby, not mine, and he had his own reasons. Too much of Brando at the end, way too much, and too much of Sheen in confinement, too many varieties of confinement. By the time he got the deed done, I was so bored I wanted to hit fast forward. I liked what Sheen said of Brando's quarters, "It smelled like slow death in there, malaria, nightmares." But, by the time Redux was over, I was so bored I'd become fidgety.  

My objection to the deleted scene with the French was about placing the war in the context of history, even of reality. The story of the film was this is absurdity, not reality. It was every bit a version of Jaroslav Hasek's GOOD SOLDIER SCHWEIK as it was of Conrad's HEART OF DARKNESS. The absurdity of war. Sheen's character said, "Charging a man with murder in this place is like handing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500." Another good observation by Sheen, "The bullshit piled up so fast in Vietnam, you needed wings to stay above it." In the Absurd tradition, this film rates among the best, up there with Pinter and Beckett. Early in the story, the absurdity is noted with smiles and laughs, resignation to the absurd everywhere. First words in the story, Sheen looking out the blinds of his hotel room, says, "Saigon. Shit." It struck me early on, when Chef, the Cajun guy on the boat, had his first melt-down moment, Lance, the surfer, was watching him, laughing like he was having an acid experience. Both their faces in the same scene, one freaking out and losing it, the other looking on amused. I felt like this was the turning point in the nature of absurdity. Before, the absurd was something to be laughed at. The comedy went out of it at this point.

The US military was the comic part of the overwhelming absurdity, Kurtz was the sinister part of the military's yin/yang of absurdity. They said Kurtz was insane. The absurdity of his insanity was that it seemed not to be insane at all. When Dennis Hopper gave for an example of Kurtz's genius something he'd said the day before, "If is the middle word in life." This observation is so college freshman profound it can only ring absurd coming from a grownup mega-military man. Kurtz's reading of TS Eliot's THE HOLLOW MEN is indeed profound and a comment on the absurdity:

          We are the hollow men

          We are the stuffed men

          Leaning together

          Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

          Our dried voices, when

          We whisper together

          Are quiet and meaningless

          As wind in dry grass

          Or rats' feet over broken glass

          In our dry cellar.

               Shape without form, shade without color,

          Paralyzed force, gesture without motion.... 

The absurd war is an excellent vehicle for a work of art commenting on an absurd time, or an absurd era. The absurdity of wiping out an entire village because the surf had six foot peaks, good for surfing, is played to the absurd Nth degree by Robert Duvall, Kilgore (kill / gore). When the village woman threw a hand grenade into the landed helicopter and it exploded, Kilgore seeing it from the air, commented, "Fucking savages!" He ran her down with his chopper's machine guns, saying, "I'm gonna get that dink bitch." There, too, another absurdity, common American usage with language. The absurdity becomes all the more sinister as the story travels up the river, deep into jungle, deep into uncharted territory, deep within where the soldiers are tripping on acid, unto the place where the ultra-soldier is tripping on ego in a primitive world of spear-chuckers and death. The Redux version of the long interaction between Sheen and Brando left the absurd and became ridiculous. Coppola was right to cut most of it. At the end of the Redux version, Brando comes across as a dumbass. Trimmed down to the essential, those scenes at the end are powerful and penetrating, giving a larger than life feeling to Brando's character.

The books he was reading were profound for the time, FROM RITUAL TO ROMANCE, THE GOLDEN BOUGH, and a TS Eliot volume. Ten years later, it would have been Joseph Campbell titles. In that time, these titles identified him an intellectual. He was torn between war and peace. In his pursuit of war, he dove deep within, so deep there was no turning back. He needed an agent from the military itself to release him from the ongoing war within, to give him peace, which, evidently, he drew Sheen's character to himself to do. He had gone as far on his journey away from this world as he could of his own power. He needed someone to release him from his body. The greatest absurdity of all was that this entire mission, from the time it was given to Sheen's character unto his return, never happened and will never happen. Coppola's appearance in the film as director telling Sheen and others to "act like you're fighting," reinforced that none of it ever happened. It's just a story.

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