Gwen Shlam's Blog: Get Carter: In search of lost Tyne

It's 40 years since Get Carter hit British cinemas. The Guardian goes to meet the man in charge of the birthday celebrations

It's not even midday, and already my head is filled with stuff both unpleasant and grimly compelling: murder, violence, organised crime, the lower-grade parts of the sex industry, you name it. Having already visited pubs, houses, and the ruins of industrial installations, we've just called in at a cemetery; the next stop is a riverside location that will bring back memories of a reckless shoot-out.

This is a dry run for a guided tour conceived to mark the 40th birthday of Mike Hodges's Get Carter, the brilliant British film that set Michael Caine ? in the role of Jack Carter ? loose around Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Gateshead and beyond. My host is Chris Phipps, a film-maker and former producer on the Newcastle-located TV music show The Tube, who is an illuminating authority on the film that has brought me up here.

"If you look at the time Get Carter was made," he says at one point, "The Beatles had broken up, the Krays' trial had revealed that gangsters weren't music-hall characters, the optimism had gone ? the keyword was change. And the way Get Carter captured that with such authenticity was fantastic." In other words, Caine's psychotic manouevres pointed the way from Carnaby Street finery and Harold Wilson's "white heat of technology" to a culture increasingly haunted by corruption, industrial strife, and snowballing national angst.

This morning, then, the actual plot ? gangster loses brother, comes back to his native city to investigate and avenge, kills at will, and then meets his own awful end ? is less important than the film's bigger picture, and what it said about both Newcastle and Britain as a whole. As we drive from location to location, out it all comes: the north-south divide, the post-industrial condition, and the great mulch of corruption and quiet criminality that sat under so much of a national culture whose in-built instinct was always to look the other way.

Get Carter was released in 1971. Back then, Newcastle and the capital were separated by metaphorical light years, as proved by the sense that Caine's character had left one discrete reality, and entered quite another. Moreover, as evidenced by the film's rubble-strewn and semi-derelict backdrops, the decline and decay that would so define the north's experience of the 1980s had already begun to take root.

Locally, the film drew on plenty of intrigue. Most notably, there was an infamous 1967 case known as the one-armed bandit murder, in which a money-collector for a firm that supplied fruit machines to working men's clubs was killed, shining light on the trade's links with organised crime. There was also the tale of T Dan Smith, the Newcastle council leader who imagined Newcastle rebuilt as the high-rise "Brasilia of the north", was eventually jailed for corruption, and inspired the character of Austin Donahue in Our Friends in the North. Get Carter alludes to both themes: pointedly in the case of the murder; more subtly in its portrait of a cityscape being rebuilt in line with modernist brutalism.

Forty years on, what traces of Get Carter's Newcastle remain? Inevitably, much has changed beyond recognition. The Long Bar, the one-time institution Caine enters straight off the train from London, has long since been demolished; on the same site, there now stands a bar-cum-nightspot called The Lounge. The nearby Victoria & Comet, the setting for Jack's brother's wake and the scene in which a female club singer grapples with a punter's jealous wife, is now a branch of the Irish-themed bar chain O'Neill's. Most disappointingly, the huge Trinity Square car park in Gateshead, where Caine goes to talk to a local fruit-machine magnate named Cliff Brumby ? who is soon hurled from the top ? was pulled down last year, despite pleas for a reprieve (spying a commercial opportunity, the local council quickly offered pieces of the rubble at �5 a go).

After half an hour on the tour, there comes something of a revelation: that if you judiciously choose the locations, you can still immerse yourself in what remains of the film's backdrop. Despite a recent sprucing-up, the so-called High Level Bridge, on which Caine arranges a meeting with his dead brother's girlfriend, is pretty much as was: a darkened tunnel with a railway rattling overhead, the great grey Tyne below, and a sign advertising the Samaritans at the Gateshead end. The West Road cemetery, the setting for Frank Carter's miserably ill-attended funeral, is largely unchanged. Down Coburg Street in Gateshead, the B&B Mike Hodges mischievously called the Las Vegas ? whence Caine at one point emerges in the buff, carrying only his double-barreled shotgun ? still stands, though now as then it's actually a private house.

Back at my hotel, I put in a call to Mike Hodges, now 78, and resident in Dorset. He will be visiting here for the weekend of events organised to celebrate the 40th anniversary, and is happy to talk through the Newcastle-centred aspects of the film's creation.

The original novel ? Jack's Return Home by Ted Lewis, published in 1970 ? found Jack Carter travelling to south Yorkshire, but on account of his own history, Hodges had other ideas. "I did my national service on the lower deck of a minesweeper," he says, "and I went all the way up the east coast: Lowestoft, Grimsby, Hull, North Shields. I would go ashore, and although I came from a sort of lower-middle-class family, I was in disguise, really. I would go into all these pubs, and witness all these extraordinary Hogarthian scenes. And a lot of things described in the book reminded me so much of those places. I felt comfortable with the kind of locations in the novel: although it was set in a different place, it was a milieu that I knew."

Having read the book and resolved to film it, he duly set out looking for some of his old haunts. "But when I went up the east coast, looking for locations for the film, each one of the places I had in mind had gone. They weren't gentrified, but they'd been demolished and rebuilt. And as I went further north, I was in despair because all the places that I'd imagined and experienced had all vanished. I then thought about North Shields, and set off to go there ? but this time, I was coming by land. And I came across Newcastle, which I'd never been to before. And as soon as I saw it, I knew that's where I wanted to shoot. It was such an incredibly visual city. It didn't look like a British city. It looked like Chicago or New York.

"There were those extraordinary bridges and, of course, the other element was the huge ships, which were a kind of architecture in themselves. The river was just amazing: hard, and rusty. And with all the houses that ended up in the film, you felt you could begin to understand why someone as psychotic as Jack Carter had ended up the way he was."

He explains how Get Carter came to draw on the aforementioned one-armed bandit murder. As suggested by the film's arresting sense of reality, Hodges cut his teeth as a documentary maker for Granada Television's World in Action and when he settled on filming in Newcastle, he begin to investigate the story. He had an instant sense of common themes and brought fiction and fact together via his use of the country house that had recently belonged to one Vince Landa, a big player in the fruit-machine trade to which the killing was linked, and which, according to Hodges, hosted the kind of orgiastic parties recreated in the film. "At the end of Get Carter," he explains, "there are tracking shots across the faces of all these people at the house after it's been raided by the police. A lot of them were the actual people who'd been up to the house for Vince Landa's parties."

I have one other line of enquiry: the idea that Get Carter pointed the way to the pain and strife of the 1970s. Does he buy it? "The film says something slightly different to me," he offers. "Most people had a very rosy picture of Britain back then. It was very complacent, I think ? you know, only foreigners were corrupt. A lot of people had a very Panglossian view of society, and I was interested in puncturing that. Anyone who was even moderately observant knew it wasn't so."

Quite by chance, the driver who takes me back to Newcastle's airport turns out to be a Get Carter aficionado. John Savage is 52 and a former shipbuilder; he says he appreciates the film for both Caine's ice-cold performance, and the way it captures things that have long since disappeared: not just large swathes of the landscape, but an entire local culture. "People here are proud of it, I think," he says. "Watching it, you do think, 'Was it really that tough in them days?' But I think it was."

He mentions the one armed bandit murder, and the tangle of stories that surround it. "There's a book in all that," he reckons. "Someone should write it."

Not me, I tell him: a la Jack Carter, I might end up with a hole in my head on a windswept local beach.

"Not likely, man," he scoffs, just as we draw up. "We've gone soft now."

Carter Is 40, a weekend of events to celebrate Get Carter's 40th anniversary, takes place in Newcastle between 11?13 March. Details: tynesidecinema.co.uk

John Harris

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