GET CARTER (1971) ** Quaintly desperate film that never recovers from itself. I mean, if you want to convince us that an actor as established and personable as Michael Caine is really cruel, calculating, and cold-feverishly homicidal...you at least need to offer up an intense and defining scene early. Instead Michael enters stage right wisecracking and drinking beer, ok we know this guy, then they try to sell us something else that doesn't play to many of his strengths. Mike Hodges shoots great shots and angles regularly, constructs admirable montages on an appropriate basis, and keeps a reasonably discreet distance for someone dealing so much flash, but he must ultimately lack some confidence in the result: how else can you account for skin at such regular intervals that has little or nothing to do with the plot? Britt Ekland for example, billed third, appears in the film for a single scene of a three minute phone call, one minute of which she manages to keep on her clothes. The violence is more appropriate but entirely unconvincing, Caine and everyone else are clearly pulling their punches-he's knocking people out with shots that would barely get things going on a playground full of ten-year olds. Also the plot, I mean when's the last time a mystery actually got solved because the protagonist happens to flip on a film projecter at the bedside of his drunk-driver lover? Admittedly it might be a plot worth writing about, so long as it isn't this one.
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