When Get Carter came up for discussion, I ordered a copy of
the movie; I
wanted to see if I had missed anything in the TV version.
This time,
however, I decided to read the book first. And while I can't
help
picturing Michael Caine as Jack Carter, I must say the book
holds up
very well. If you haven't read it yet, Bill, you should enjoy
it. It
is of the man comes into the town of his youth and tries to
clean it up
sub-genre. Of course, the twist is Jack Carter is a bad guy
himself.
So Ted Lewis masterfully manages to have it both ways. Just
like the
frontiersmen in westerns, he has the skills of the bad guys,
after all
he is one himself. You've gotta love the scene where he walks
two
gunmen out of the house wearing nothing but a shotgun. So
this bad guy
manages to take the high ground, while knowing every rock to
look under.
Not even Jack, himself, is unaware of the irony of this, that
if it had
been anyone but his brother who was killed, or SPOILER ALERT
anyone but
his niece who had made the porno film, it could have been
Jack himself
doing the killing or the pulling. As it is, he is the
outsider who
comes in and tilts the fine balance of the town, just like
Red Harvest
or Yojimbo (along with its two remakes, Fistfull of Dollars
and Last Man
Standing).
I'm looking forward to watching the movie again. Didn't
someone
recently say Get Carer was being remade by Steven Soderbergh?
I
couldn't find any info from imdb.com, which does list a
couple of his
upcoming projects. Does anyone have confirmation of
this?
Mark
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