Get Carter is the 1971 film based on the novel Jack Returns Home by Ted Lewis. In it we find Jack Carter (Sir Michael Caine), a London mob enforcer returning to his old stomping ground in the North, the city of Newcastle and nearby town of Gateshead. His goal is to uncover the truth surrounding his brother’s untimely death, an undertaking which brings him into direct conflict with local crime firms, as well as his own criminal employers, both of whom would prefer the death be forgotten.
It’s one hell of a movie, one which cemented itself in my top ten from the moment I first saw it in my early teens, a position which it has held ever since (impressive for a list which changes more often than your bipolar girlfriend). I’ve seen it beginning to end countless times. It’s one of the few films of which I've watched the Director’s commentary, too. It never gets old. Whenever I hear that theme over the opening credits, that gentle twang of the base guitar joined by soft piano oozing cool over the scene, I feel a shiver in my plumbs. It’s an awesome tune.
The opening credits are seemingly inconsequential at first, the cast and crews names breaking way to reveal grainy footage of Carter traveling up north via train. He reads Farewell My Lovely while the English country rolls by over his shoulder, slurps soup in the dining cart and slowly, methodically, takes medication in the bathroom. The images are calmly paced, almost sedate in their presentation. All of this is deliberate. I’ve traveled that line myself and while it’s a fairly long journey by the standards of the United Kingdom, it’s not more than six or seven hours in reality. And yet, from the scenes we see at the start of the film, by the time Carter arrives at Newcastle’s Central station, we would be forgiven for believing the man had traveled some great distance, and metaphorically speaking, he has, because back then every county was a country in itself, and the North and South different worlds entirely.
From those few introductory scenes we are presented with everything which makes the movie such a great one. Sure the acting is superb, and the story too, the tale of justifiable and merciless revenge being cathartic to behold when England today seems awash with what C.S. Lewis would call ‘men without chests’ (or in the case of the swelling number of trannies we now see, men with chests). Anyway, all of these things lend to the films greatness, but what really does it for me is the skill with which the director managed to capture the time and place, 1970’s England, a nation with character and culture, rich with regional identities, proud of itself and brimming with a true and intriguing diversity.
Back then England was a place which still had time and appreciation for beauty and craftsmanship, a country where a man could take himself seriously and where irony and slobbish standards had not yet rotted him and his home. We see this from the off. Carter wears a tailored suit and the train he rides, while not quite so grand as those of Britain’s Victorian golden age, looks a damn sight better than those hurtling dildos which cut through our countryside today, those aesthetically uninspired Virgin Rail things which cost a fortune and are always filled with drunk tossers and homosexual ticket inspectors (that is when the frigging drivers aren’t on strike again, or when some malnourished climate activist hasn’t climbed on the roof to protest the tax on almond milk).
The movie isn’t shot in a totally untainted England mind you, just one a little less mad than today. No great achievement really, but still refreshing. Actually the nation which this movie captures is one in the midst of a great transition. You can actually see that we are starting to go potty. Carter is the classic English gentleman in his manner and attire (if not a little heavy handed). Strange then, to see him traversing the brutalist spires of the working class North, the most notorious being that great grey car park which was made famous by the film and which scarred the landscape of Gateshead throughout my childhood.
You see, I’m from the town where Get Carter was shot. I guess you could say that I was born and raised on the set, so to speak. I remember that awful car park well, and the indoor market which it towered over, also build in that oppressive style but this time painted piss yellow rather than left the usual shade of ‘kill yourself' grey. It was hard to look upon such a structure, even as a young child, and draw any conclusion other than someone in power had placed the thing there to punish us. And they were everywhere, those concrete shit heaps, all over my local area.
The adjoining city of Newcastle (which also featured heavily in the film), had it's fair share too. In fact, there were once plans to build an entire brutalist city above the current, historical one, a sort of dystopia on stilts, the construction of which had actually began and can be seen on John Dobson street. Part of the plans involved concreting over the Tyne river which serves as a natural boarder between Newcastle and Gateshead, building a civic center on the new ground which was to look like the sort of place political opposition would be sent to be shot in an Orwell novel,thus uniting the two councils. Thankfully these plans fell through, the Labour MP responsible being arrested for fraud, but he still managed to do a fair bit of damage before that day.
Despite the powers that be and the architectural mad men on their payroll trying to turn my region into something out of Blade Runner, they failed (at least initially). The elites were novice in their deconstruction of nation and identity then and the ugly market was soon taken over by the locals so that the high street remained as vibrant as ever. I have the fondest childhood memories of that place, of the second hand VHS stall and the statue of the smiling butcher outside of his shop, of the pet shop where I could stand for hours watching the fish and of the barbers where the owner would always take me to get a mix up or an ice cream while dad was getting his hair cut. On the nearby highstreet there was a great fish and chip place, and across the road from the pub where my dad used to buy his tax free tobacco there was a herbalists where you could order a sarsaparilla at the counter, the same one my grandfather had taken my father to when he was a bairn.
Yes, despite the attempt at oppression the locals shone through like flowers through the cracks in a council estate wall. They took the crap hole which they’d been handed and built a community there, resilient sods what they are. Still, watching Jack Carter, with his old English style and confidence, walking such a place, the contrast is bound to seer itself in the viewers brain. What they are seeing, is an England on the brink, going mad and immoral, a sentiment echoed by the movies theme of crime, murder and predatory pornographers taking advantage of underage girls, one of whom turns out to be a relation of Carter’s.
What we see in the movie is a society unraveling, everything from it’s communities to it’s decency coming apart, and one where such quaint scenes as brass bands marching through the streets exist on borrowed time. Things have only gotten worse. These days every English county is standardized, the flat caps and regional accents giving way to baseball caps and dumb youths who talk like African-American rappers. There are no tailored suits anymore, only off the rack tat and over priced sportswear made a in Asian sweat shops. Even that predatory pornography industry which the movie sees Carter exact bloody revenge upon is applauded as empowering and liberating by the fatherless women who fall into it.
The deconstruction of England has intensified all right, those behind it (because I do believe this is being done to us), seeming to have honed their sinister skill. Gloomy concrete buildings looming over an oppressed citizenry is so 20th century. Better to give the plebs something a bit prettied up, not too nice mind you, or unique, we don't want them developing a sense of pride, but something just canny enough that they don't realise they've had their nation stolen and their collective soul ripped out.
Thats’s why the market and the car park, so pivotal to the film and my childhood, is gone today, torn down and replaced, and not with something better, but with that vapid glass and steel architecture the likes of which can be found in every developed city in the world because really, it belongs to no people or place. The brutalist builds might have felt oppressive, but at least they made you feel something, at least they told you plain as day what you were dealing with, what you’re rulers thought of you. With this modern stuff, there’s nothing at all, yet it’s actually less capable of sustaining life than it's predecessor.
Remember how I told you that the locals made the last market their own? Well, not this one. This one was a joint venture between Gateshead council and the supermarket giant Tesco. It’s one of their stores which serves as the squares centerpiece now, massive and clinical, the workers within all grey faced and shuffling about with all of the energy of fish in polluted water. Besides the Tesco a number of shops were built, the rent too high for any small local business to afford. The pet shop, barber’s and butcher’s are all gone. They’ve been replaced by the likes of Costa and Nando’s. Not even the high street survived. Business simply dropped too much when the original market was demolished so that most of the pubs and shops shut their doors. The chippy became a Turkish grill (which itself went bust), and the herbalist’s where three generations of my family had wet their whistles closed too. The place is a ghost town which the council is thinking of tearing down to make room for a park where the junkies and grooming gangs can congregate.
And what of the locals, what became of them? Well, not having the taste for exotic chicken or over priced coffee, fewer of them get to the square where their market once stood. There are more foreigners of course (show me a town or city in England where there aren’t), and while they do their bit to degrade the national identity of the English another group muddies our regional identity. This has been the real sinister genius in the gentrification of my home, and it came with the importation of Britain’s most contemptible native class, that being the students, their accomodation being built right above the square itself like some cloud city for the entitled. It is these students who keep the cafes and restaurants in profit, spending tax money to do it like the glorified dole wallers that they are while they learn at university and from titted idiots on tik tok that ‘England never really had a culture anyhow’.
In the North East, like everywhere else in England and the wider West, we’ve been attacked on all fronts, our culture and identity stripped like some used car before our very eyes until there’s little left. Perhaps we’ve gotten off a little better than most places, certainly the south has had it worse, so much so that Michael Caine’s native East End is now firmly conquered, his people fleeing to Essex and beyond.
It shows no sign of slowing. The globalist monster still has some growing to do. Still, movies like Get Carter hold value beyond entertainment. They are time capsules which remind us that there was more to our people than consumerism and suicidal levels of tolerance. We were a real people, our ways and land exclusive (that being the one method by which a nation can survive). Even now that England has not died, she's still out there, if you look in the right places.
While viewing these old movies of our home may draw out that same sorrowful nostalgia with which one looks upon a photo of a deceased relative, it’s important to remember that so long as the English still exist, so to will England, even if confined only to a single home. No matter how bad things get, there will always be a Jack Carter, an Englishman of force and principle, holding his head high and walking through the hellish waste which was once his home. Like a tree from a single seed, a nation can grow again from such a man. Look back not with that painful ache for a home long lost, but for inspiration to drive forward. You can carry a nation.
Jack.
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