Get Carter: Who needs an accent if you can act?

I've rolled my eyes here at Detectives Beyond Borders at movie stars whose hardest work seems to consist in showing us how hard they work. My targets have included Kevin Spacey's award mugging and Benicio Del Toro's lisping and mumbling in The Usual Suspects,  Ed Norton's meta-mugging in The Score, and the unspeakably awful accents in The Drowning Pool.

Then there's Michael Caine in Get Carter, playing a gangster who returns home to investigate his brother's death. Caine's character is from the north of England, but to my uneducated ears, he might never have ventured out of earshot of Bow Bells. And you know what? It doesn't matter, because Caine does not see it as his job to mumble, lurch, limp, or gain 60 pounds to play a role. All he does is act, and if you can do that, you don't need an accent or any other Method crap.  Watch Caine in Get Carter, and you'll see a great actor in a great movie based on a great crime novel.

Ted Lewis

And that brings me to the international crime fiction event of the year. This week I'll attend a launch for Syndicate Books, a new imprint that is releasing not only Get Carter (original title: Jack's Return Home) in the U.S. for the first time in decades, but a good chunk of rest of author Ted Lewis' oeuvre, including two more of the Jack Carter novels, some for the first time ever in the U.S.

This new edition of Get Carter includes an introduction by Mike Hodges, who directed the film adaptation that starred Caine.The novel earns a spot as one of Allan Guthrie's 200 Noirs (as does Lewis' Billy Rags, due as an e-book from Syndicate)  Eight more novels to look forward to from an author whose admirers include David Peace and Derek Raymond? I'm excited, and you should be, too.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Get Carter gets American — and English

The second Newcastle scene of Mike Hodges' 1971 movie Get Carter has Michael Caine climbing a dingy stairwell of peeling wallpaper and, I think, crumbling plaster.

The scene is quintessentially American, and I doubt that any previous English crime movie had included anything comparable. Moreover, Hodges and Caine knew they were bringing an American sensibility to British moviemaking; check out the book Caine's character reads on the train from London to Newcastle.

But as obvious and as bracing as the American influence is, the movie conveys a strong sense of place. Streets crammed with rows of attached houses are dwarfed by a mammoth, steaming, exhaling industrial complex. And the camera lingers on silent, time-worn faces in the local pub, in the manner of a good documentary. I don't know if this picture of Tyneside in the early '70s is accurate, but it is convincing, and that's what matters.

I also don't know how big Newcastle's Irish population was at the time, but if my uneducated ears don't deceive me, the movie is full of Irish accents, and not bad ones, either. This, too, makes the setting all the more convincing and convincingly English.

This naturally puts me in mind of the debt that current Irish crime writers acknowledge to Americans who went before. Perhaps the strongest such acknowledgement comes from Ken Bruen, who has said that "All my influences are American. That's how I learned to read. That's how I learned to write." And that doesn't make Bruen or Declan Hughes or Declan Burke or any of them any less Irish in my eyes.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010