Mike Hodges RIP

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armchairlawyer
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Mike Hodges RIP

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Mike Hodges obituary
Director whose film Get Carter starring Michael Caine was lauded as one of the finest examples of the British crime thriller

When a copy of a crime novel titled Jack’s Return Home landed on Mike Hodges’ doormat with a letter asking if he would be interested in adapting and directing it for the cinema, the approach came out of the blue.
He had never directed a film for the big screen or adapted a novel before and his lack of experience perhaps explained why he was offered a flat fee of just £7,000.
The film was Get Carter (1971) starring Michael Caine as a mob enforcer with a penchant for sharp suits and shotguns who uncovers a web of murder and vice on returning to his birthplace of Newcastle to investigate his brother’s death.
With a whip-smart repertoire of memorable one-liners such as “You’re a big man but you’re in bad shape; with me, it’s a full-time job. Now behave yourself”, the fledgling director told Caine he did not want him to repeat his role in The Italian Job, a film that he dismissed as “a slick, colourful caper where nobody really seems to get hurt”. Rather the anti-hero in Get Carter was an altogether tougher proposition, “a stone-cold killer who goes over the top in his search for revenge” with no concessions to morality, let alone capering.
It was a peerless writer-director debut. Get Carter changed the nature of crime drama and the gangster film, and its unwavering intensity was an acknowledged influence on the likes of Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino.
Hodges called the film “a Jacobean tragedy with a heavy body count”. On its release it was too much for many critics, who lambasted it as “nasty” and “soulless”. However, it attracted a cult following and in 1999 the BFI ranked Get Carter 16th in a poll of the top 100 British films of the 20th century, while a survey of critics by the magazine Total Film voted it the greatest British-made movie of all time.
The film became such a classic that the brutalist concrete multistorey car park in Gateshead from which Jack Carter throws a corrupt local businessman to his death became known as the Get Carter Car Park. When scheduled for demolition in 2007, an international campaign — supported by Sylvester Stallone among others — was launched to save it. The protesters failed to prevent the car park’s demolition but Gateshead council cashed in by selling pieces of the rubble to fans of the film as souvenirs. It was fitting, for the mean streets of the film’s location played as important a part in the drama as Caine. Ted Lewis’s novel had based the action in no specific location so Hodges drew on his experience of National Service on a Royal Navy minesweeper that had taken him to ports up and down the North Sea coast from Grimsby to Hull and North Shields.
“I saw horrendous poverty in these Hogarthian places and I couldn’t help but connect them to the novel,” he said. However, when he went scouting for locations he found that most of the ports had “become gentrified”. It was only when he reached Tyneside that he found what he was seeking. “You could understand how someone like Jack Carter could emerge from a place like Newcastle. It had all the hardness of Jack himself so visually it said immediately what it should be.”
Astonishingly, Hodges shot Get Carter in just 45 days, and it was in cinemas almost a year to the day after he had first read the novel on which it was based. “I thought film-making was always going to be like that: decisions quickly taken and acted on, instinct always in the driving seat. How wrong I was,” he observed with rueful hindsight. Over the next 40 years he made only nine more feature films, all of them notable but a far less prolific output than his talent deserved. “Keeping instinct alive in an industry run largely by committees of incompetent and frightened executives is no easy matter,” he said.
“Mike doesn’t like compromising very much,” his friend Malcolm McDowell, the Clockwork Orange star, observed. “Now that’s a great strength as I see it, but it doesn’t help when you’re trying to work within the studio system.”
Yet for Hodges artistic integrity was more important than money. “I’ve had a terribly bumpy career,” he admitted. “But if you’re uncompromising like I am, it’s inevitably going to be a tough ride, so I’m not going to bleat about it.” He was perfectly capable of walking out if he felt compromised and famously quit the 1978 horror film Damien: Omen II when an American producer placed a loaded gun on the table during an argument about budgets.
It cemented a low opinion of Hollywood and America in general. “I began to realise it was a culture based heavily on addiction. The object of every manufacturer was to make people become addicted to something, anything,” he said.
He is survived by his second wife, Carol Laws, whom he married in 2004, and by his sons Ben and Jake from his first marriage to Jean (née Alexandrov), which was dissolved in 1982.


The divorce left him broke but he came to regard it as a spiritual liberation. “I found myself doing all the things I swore I’d never do,” he said of his marriage. “The kids were going to private school, we had the country house and the town flat and two cars and God knows how many television sets in every room.” His response was to turn his back on materialism. “I eat well and I drink well but I decided I didn’t want to embrace anything beyond that. The only things I’m interested in buying are books and CDs,” he said. “Once you remove the pressures and money worries, you immediately feel freer and can start making the films you really want to make.
Michael Tommy Hodges was born in Bristol in 1932 into a lower middle-class family and recalled “a childhood dominated by Roman Catholicism, an indoctrination process I managed to shed in my early teens, but not without a struggle”. His parents pressured him to follow a “profession” and he reluctantly qualified as a chartered accountant, after which he was required to do two years of National Service. His accountancy degree meant he could automatically have had a commission but to his parents’ chagrin he opted to become a seaman below decks. He went in as a “complacent young Tory” and came out as “an angry, radical young man”.
He began in television as a humble teleprompter and learnt by watching, rising to become a producer on Granada’s World in Action, for which he made a film about the Vietnam War. TV thrillers such as Suspect (1969) and Rumour (1970) attracted the attention of the producer Michael Klinger, who invited him to make Get Carter.
Later films included Pulp (1972), another crime drama starring Caine, and The Terminal Man (1974), which brought him into conflict with Warner Brothers, which refused to distribute it until it got a letter of appreciation from the film-maker Terrence Malick, who wrote, “I have just come from seeing The Terminal Man and want you to know what a magnificent, overwhelming picture it is”. Warners then promoted the film with a poster that reprinted Malick’s letter in full.
Hodges was brought in to direct Flash Gordon (1980) after Nicolas Roeg had been sacked and Sergio Leone had turned down the job. He described the camp fun that followed as “the only improvised $27 million movie ever made”.
Later came a surprise hit with the neo-noirish Croupier (1998), starring Clive Owen. When Film Four declined to distribute the film in the UK, Hodges was convinced his career was over and was ready to retire to his vegetable plot in Dorset. However, two years later the film found a US distributor and was finally released in the UK on the back of a positive reaction in America.
It enabled him to make his final feature, I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead (2003), a complicated tale of vengeance exploring similar themes to Get Carter and starring Owen and a snarling Malcolm McDowell.
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By then Get Carter had been given a hapless Hollywood remake, relocated from Newcastle to Seattle and with a wooden Stallone in the title role. Hodges never got around to seeing it. When his son brought him a DVD of the remake from Hong Kong, he made a half-hearted attempt to watch it but the systems were not compatible “so we put it in the dustbin”. He knew that the original was matchless, anyway.
Mike Hodges, film director, was born on July 29, 1932. He died on December 17, 2022, aged 90


https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/mike ... -gs93k7jq2
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Jerry Atrick
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Re: Mike Hodges RIP

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armchairlawyer wrote: Fri Dec 23, 2022 5:01 pm Mike Hodges obituary
Director whose film Get Carter starring Michael Caine was lauded as one of the finest examples of the British crime thriller

When a copy of a crime novel titled Jack’s Return Home landed on Mike Hodges’ doormat with a letter asking if he would be interested in adapting and directing it for the cinema, the approach came out of the blue.
He had never directed a film for the big screen or adapted a novel before and his lack of experience perhaps explained why he was offered a flat fee of just £7,000.
The film was Get Carter (1971) starring Michael Caine as a mob enforcer with a penchant for sharp suits and shotguns who uncovers a web of murder and vice on returning to his birthplace of Newcastle to investigate his brother’s death.
With a whip-smart repertoire of memorable one-liners such as “You’re a big man but you’re in bad shape; with me, it’s a full-time job. Now behave yourself”, the fledgling director told Caine he did not want him to repeat his role in The Italian Job, a film that he dismissed as “a slick, colourful caper where nobody really seems to get hurt”. Rather the anti-hero in Get Carter was an altogether tougher proposition, “a stone-cold killer who goes over the top in his search for revenge” with no concessions to morality, let alone capering.
It was a peerless writer-director debut. Get Carter changed the nature of crime drama and the gangster film, and its unwavering intensity was an acknowledged influence on the likes of Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino.
Hodges called the film “a Jacobean tragedy with a heavy body count”. On its release it was too much for many critics, who lambasted it as “nasty” and “soulless”. However, it attracted a cult following and in 1999 the BFI ranked Get Carter 16th in a poll of the top 100 British films of the 20th century, while a survey of critics by the magazine Total Film voted it the greatest British-made movie of all time.
The film became such a classic that the brutalist concrete multistorey car park in Gateshead from which Jack Carter throws a corrupt local businessman to his death became known as the Get Carter Car Park. When scheduled for demolition in 2007, an international campaign — supported by Sylvester Stallone among others — was launched to save it. The protesters failed to prevent the car park’s demolition but Gateshead council cashed in by selling pieces of the rubble to fans of the film as souvenirs. It was fitting, for the mean streets of the film’s location played as important a part in the drama as Caine. Ted Lewis’s novel had based the action in no specific location so Hodges drew on his experience of National Service on a Royal Navy minesweeper that had taken him to ports up and down the North Sea coast from Grimsby to Hull and North Shields.
“I saw horrendous poverty in these Hogarthian places and I couldn’t help but connect them to the novel,” he said. However, when he went scouting for locations he found that most of the ports had “become gentrified”. It was only when he reached Tyneside that he found what he was seeking. “You could understand how someone like Jack Carter could emerge from a place like Newcastle. It had all the hardness of Jack himself so visually it said immediately what it should be.”
Astonishingly, Hodges shot Get Carter in just 45 days, and it was in cinemas almost a year to the day after he had first read the novel on which it was based. “I thought film-making was always going to be like that: decisions quickly taken and acted on, instinct always in the driving seat. How wrong I was,” he observed with rueful hindsight. Over the next 40 years he made only nine more feature films, all of them notable but a far less prolific output than his talent deserved. “Keeping instinct alive in an industry run largely by committees of incompetent and frightened executives is no easy matter,” he said.
“Mike doesn’t like compromising very much,” his friend Malcolm McDowell, the Clockwork Orange star, observed. “Now that’s a great strength as I see it, but it doesn’t help when you’re trying to work within the studio system.”
Yet for Hodges artistic integrity was more important than money. “I’ve had a terribly bumpy career,” he admitted. “But if you’re uncompromising like I am, it’s inevitably going to be a tough ride, so I’m not going to bleat about it.” He was perfectly capable of walking out if he felt compromised and famously quit the 1978 horror film Damien: Omen II when an American producer placed a loaded gun on the table during an argument about budgets.
It cemented a low opinion of Hollywood and America in general. “I began to realise it was a culture based heavily on addiction. The object of every manufacturer was to make people become addicted to something, anything,” he said.
He is survived by his second wife, Carol Laws, whom he married in 2004, and by his sons Ben and Jake from his first marriage to Jean (née Alexandrov), which was dissolved in 1982.


The divorce left him broke but he came to regard it as a spiritual liberation. “I found myself doing all the things I swore I’d never do,” he said of his marriage. “The kids were going to private school, we had the country house and the town flat and two cars and God knows how many television sets in every room.” His response was to turn his back on materialism. “I eat well and I drink well but I decided I didn’t want to embrace anything beyond that. The only things I’m interested in buying are books and CDs,” he said. “Once you remove the pressures and money worries, you immediately feel freer and can start making the films you really want to make.
Michael Tommy Hodges was born in Bristol in 1932 into a lower middle-class family and recalled “a childhood dominated by Roman Catholicism, an indoctrination process I managed to shed in my early teens, but not without a struggle”. His parents pressured him to follow a “profession” and he reluctantly qualified as a chartered accountant, after which he was required to do two years of National Service. His accountancy degree meant he could automatically have had a commission but to his parents’ chagrin he opted to become a seaman below decks. He went in as a “complacent young Tory” and came out as “an angry, radical young man”.
He began in television as a humble teleprompter and learnt by watching, rising to become a producer on Granada’s World in Action, for which he made a film about the Vietnam War. TV thrillers such as Suspect (1969) and Rumour (1970) attracted the attention of the producer Michael Klinger, who invited him to make Get Carter.
Later films included Pulp (1972), another crime drama starring Caine, and The Terminal Man (1974), which brought him into conflict with Warner Brothers, which refused to distribute it until it got a letter of appreciation from the film-maker Terrence Malick, who wrote, “I have just come from seeing The Terminal Man and want you to know what a magnificent, overwhelming picture it is”. Warners then promoted the film with a poster that reprinted Malick’s letter in full.
Hodges was brought in to direct Flash Gordon (1980) after Nicolas Roeg had been sacked and Sergio Leone had turned down the job. He described the camp fun that followed as “the only improvised $27 million movie ever made”.
Later came a surprise hit with the neo-noirish Croupier (1998), starring Clive Owen. When Film Four declined to distribute the film in the UK, Hodges was convinced his career was over and was ready to retire to his vegetable plot in Dorset. However, two years later the film found a US distributor and was finally released in the UK on the back of a positive reaction in America.
It enabled him to make his final feature, I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead (2003), a complicated tale of vengeance exploring similar themes to Get Carter and starring Owen and a snarling Malcolm McDowell.
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By then Get Carter had been given a hapless Hollywood remake, relocated from Newcastle to Seattle and with a wooden Stallone in the title role. Hodges never got around to seeing it. When his son brought him a DVD of the remake from Hong Kong, he made a half-hearted attempt to watch it but the systems were not compatible “so we put it in the dustbin”. He knew that the original was matchless, anyway.
Mike Hodges, film director, was born on July 29, 1932. He died on December 17, 2022, aged 90


https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/mike ... -gs93k7jq2
Thought it was obit of a fellow by that name I know

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Stravaiger
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Re: Mike Hodges RIP

Post by Stravaiger »

Get Carter is a great film, and that's the kind of obituary everyone would want.

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