Get Carter (1971)

Mike Hodges made his directorial debut with a film that refuses every invitation to be liked. Michael Caine's Jack Carter rides the train north to Newcastle, a London hood in a borrowed suit, and spends the next ninety minutes beating information out of a city that would rather he went home. The plot is a knot of arcades, racecourses, and multi-storey car parks. Nobody learns anything. Nobody is improved. The camera watches a man walk a beach, a rifle shot ends him, and the credits roll without a single word of guidance about how we ought to feel.

On the matter of social instruction, the film is a vacuum. Women appear as molls, as landladies, as a drunken woman in a bathtub, and as a sixteen-year-old niece whose exploitation is the engine of the plot; the film observes this horror without a framework for correcting it. The cast is white, northern, and male. There is a camp supporting turn from Tony Beckley, played for menace and amusement, and nothing else. Class is present as texture, as geography, as the sound of a working town being carved up by men with money. It is not present as argument.

The result is a film with no interest in the moral ledger of the present day. It is grim, cold, and entirely without sermons, which is precisely why it still works and precisely why it registers as nothing at all on the scales we are obliged to consult. The sommelier swirls the glass, finds no modern notes, and sets it down. Zero across the board, and the film would not thank us for saying so.