|
Get
Carter
|
Movie
|
Book
| Author
| Director
& cast
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Book:
Jack's return home (1970)
Movie: Get Carter (1971) & (2000)
Premise
movie 1971:
"A vicious London gangster, Jack Carter, travels
to Newcastle for his brother's funeral. He begins to suspect that
his brother's death was not an accident and sets out to follow a
complex trail of lies, deceit, cover-ups and backhanders through
Newcastle's underworld, leading, he hopes, to the man who ordered
his brother killed. Because of his ruthlessness Carter exhibits all
the unstopability of the android in Terminator, or Walker in Point
Blank, and he and the other characters in the film are prone to
sudden, brutal acts of violence."
from:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067128/plotsummary
Premise
movie 2000:
American remake in 2000: "The original Get Carter
(1971), directed by Croupier's Mike Hodges, stars Michael Caine as
Jack Carter, a mob enforcer who returns to his hometown after the
suspicious death of his brother. The plot has a breezy, improvised
feel and Caine is fantastic, an amoral man who would sleep with any
girl or torture any guy to get what he wants. In the American
remake, Sylvester Stallone plays a sanitized version of Jack Carter,
a guy who is violent but ultimately moral. It doesn't work nearly as
well. The whole movie seems like it's been crafted around the
Stallone persona, which gives it a manufactured rather than
spontaneous feel. Admittedly, that is not helped by the film-school
pyrotechnics of director Stephen Kay, who fills the frame with so
much unnecessary camera movement that it really feels like he spent
more time setting up the camera shots than he did on the script.
Moving the story from a small town north of London to Seattle works
better because of the subplot concerning Internet porn, of which
Seattle is a virtual hotbed. The downside is that it allows for Alan
Cumming's portrayal of a Bill Gates-like billionaire as a near-retarded boy-child. Other actors fare better with their roles,
particularly Rachel Leigh Cook and Mickey Rourke, though Michael
Caine's presence only serves to draw unfair comparisons to the
original. That said, if you buy both versions you will learn more
about the state of Hollywood at the turn of the millennium than with
a year's subscription to Variety"
from:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B000056PNL/
104-9976733-1508767?v=glance
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Premise
book:
"Ted Lewis (1940 - 1982) created the noir school of
English crime fiction with his brilliant 1970 novel Jack's Return
Home. It is the story of London enforcer Jack Carter's return to an
unspecified northern city to find out who killed his brother.
Lewis's novel was brilliantly filmed by Mike Hodges as Get Carter.
Michael Caine's classic performance is etched in the memory of three
generations of film-goers, but even these ardent fans may find it
surprising to discover that there is a book that surpasses the film
not only in overall quality, but also in grittiness, sense of place,
characterization, and convincingly rendered violence.
Although a watershed in its ferocity and power, Jack's Return Home
is very different and more humane in comparison with the cool and
distant film. Lewis's Carter is burdened with a much greater sense
of the past than Caine's character, and it is his memories of his
childhood and his gradually deteriorating relationship with his
brother, features that are absent from the film, that lend the novel
an almost unbearable depth and sadness. The book is both perhaps the
best literary thriller, as Dr John Fraser has argued, and also a
work of imagination and yearning that is equal and similar to
that greatest of American novels, The Great Gatsby, especially in its
articulation of the theme of aspiration.
But what happened? Why isn't the book more well known? Lewis and his
novel have sunk almost without trace, and this is a terrible loss
for British literature. Lewis lives on in a sense in Get Carter,
which has gone on to be regarded as a classic, even being voted the
best British film of the twentieth century in a magazine reader's
poll, but we are still left with a series of fascinating puzzles.
The main puzzle will always be the character of Ted Lewis himself.
He died at age 42, and aside from the nine novels he left, he
remains an enigma and a mass of contradictions. On the one hand he
was a tough man who jumped head first into the abyss, and on the
other he was a musician, painter and writer of great sensitivity and
almost painful shyness. He was an only child who wrote one of the
great books about brothers. He seemed to be a family man with no
experience of crime, yet he wrote probably the best and most vivid
depiction of the underworld in British literature. But is this the
whole picture? Was there a side to him that even many of his friends
didn't know about? How did he know so much about the milieu of Jack
Carter? "
from:
http://www.rsproductions.co.uk/tv/tedlewis/
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Author:
" Ted Lewis was born in Manchester, England on January 15th
1940. After a difficult post-war upbringing and a few dead-end jobs
he turned his hand to writing and illustrating, after studying for
four years at Hull Art School. He also worked in television before
writing, including doing animation on cartoons and on the Beatles'
film Yellow Submarine. In 1965, Hutchinson, a major UK publisher
accepted his first novel entitled "All The Way Home And All The
Night Through". The story centers around an art school romance and
is partly autobiographical. Then in 1970 after several attempts to
find a publisher, Michael Joseph, part of the Penguin group, finally
accepted Ted's manuscript for "Jack's Return Home".
This proved to be the highlight of Ted's career. It introduces the
character of Jack Carter. Tough and gritty, this crime thriller was
reminiscent of Raymond Chandler at his best. The Sunday Times
described the book as beginning 'quietly and convincingly' and going
on 'to increasingly violent scenes.....Ted Lewis can write tersely
and well'. The regional paper the Doncaster Evening Post summarises
Lewis' book as 'completely believable' and the dialogue being 'true
to life'. American Publishers Weekly also praised the book arguing
the book 'introduces us to a vivid parade of wildly vulgar and foul-mouthed people'.
Film rights were quickly snapped up and the now renamed "Get Carter"
went into production. Unfortunately, Ted wasn't given the chance to
write the screenplay, even though he dearly wanted to. That honour
went to Mike Hodges. Many changes were made for the film but they
were all approved by Ted, who was present at much of the filming.
After the success of "Get Carter" another novel was on the cards.
This turned out to be "Plender" and was published in 1971. This is
another crime novel concerning sex and revenge. Lewis also penned
another Carter adventure in 1974 called 'Jack Carter's Law', which
the original copies are still easily available to buy. This one was,
obviously, not as popular as the original. A further book, 'Jack
Carter and the Mafia Pigeon' was also written."
from:
http://www.btinternet.com/~mark.dear/carterbook.htm
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Director
Get Carter 1971: Mike Hodges
Cast:
Michael Caine (Jack Carter), Ian Hendry (Eric), Britt
Ekland (Anna), John Osborne (Kinnear), Tony Beckley (Peter), George
Sewell (Con), Geraldine Moffat (Glenda), Dorothy White (Margaret),
Rosemarie Dunham (Edna), Petra Markham (Doreen) and others.
Director
Get Carter 2000: Stephen T. Kay
Cast:
Sylvester Stallone (Jack Carter), Miranda Richardson
(Gloria), Rachel Leigh Cook (Doreen), Rhona Mitra (Geraldine),
Johnny Strong (Eddie), John C. McGinley (Con), Alan Cumming
(Jeremy) and others
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