With films as varied as Get Carter, Flash Gordon and Croupier to his name, Hodges, who has died aged 90, was a great social commentator as well as a wonderful storyteller
Earlier this year, the film-maker Mike Hodges wrote a wonderful letter to this newspaper, in answer to the question I had posed in an article about his
British mobster movie from 1971: “Even after 50 years, do we properly get Carter?” Hodges laid it bare: we will get Carter if we get that it’s a Hogarthian polemic about the British class system with all its shame and self-hate.
In the late 50s, Hodges did his national service in the Royal Navy, in the course of which he witnessed the poverty and wretchedness in fishing ports such as North Shields, where much of Get Carter is set. This injustice radicalised Hodges, turning him – in his own words – from a complacent young Tory into the ferocious film-maker that created this masterpiece about the dead-eyed gangland enforcer, Carter, unforgettably played by Michael Caine, working for porn barons and sex traffickers in
London, who returns to Newcastle home town to investigate the strange death of his brother. No one wants that can of worms opened, least of all Carter’s employers in “the smoke”. The consequences are chillingly violent.