The filmmaker had struck the spirits with his first film, “the law of the environment”, in 1971, without then managing to match this masterpiece. He died, on December 17, at the age of 90 years.
by Jean-François Rauger
A filmography in the end of the little nourished, an unforgettable title, a few pearls, one or two fun curiosities. This is how we could describe the career of English director Mike Hodges, died on December 17, at the age of 90, in the county of Dorset, in the southwest of the United Kingdom.
He was born in Bristol on July 29, 1932. After having started as a chartered accountant, he served two years in the royal navy. He will participate in demining actions in many ports in northern Great Britain. He will later say that this experience had made him an angry young man, the witness of a world of shortage and misery. He then entered television, where he first works as a prompt operator. He progresses quickly in the hierarchy and finds himself writing scenarios, producing and making documentary programs on political and cultural news. It was after seeing Rumour, a television dramatic produced by him for the ITV Playhouse series, that Michael Caine, who embarked on production with Michael Klinger, decided to offer him, in 1971, the film adaptation of a A novel of which he had bought the rights, Get Carter, by Ted Lewis (published in France in 1996 by Rivages editions).
a revenge story
The medium law (Get Carter), the first feature film for Mike Hodges’s cinema, can be considered one of the peaks of the British criminal film. It is a story of revenge located in the world of Newcastle gangsters, restored with harshness and realism. Michael Caine embodies a cold character and devoid of all emotion, pure machine devoid of empathy, guided by his libido and a sort of cold and cynical rage, determined to find those responsible for the death of his brother. The pulsations of Roy Budd music accompany this trip to the hell of the industrial city of northern England. After the commercial success of the film, Hodges turns again with Michael Caine. Mortal retirement (Pulp), in 1972, still produced by the actor and Michael Klinger, will be a kind of ironic abyme (perhaps a little too much) featuring a writer of detective novels in search of the assassins of the Man, an actor specializing in gangster roles and embodied by Mickey Rooney, whom he had to help write his autobiography.
The science fiction thriller adapted from a novel by Michael Crichton, the Terminal Man, produced in 1974, will be a commercial failure, but will earn him the admiration of Stanley Kubrick. Hodges is then proposed to carry out the continuation of the success of the terror of Richard Don, the curse. He begins the filming of Damien. Curse 2 before being returned by producer Harvey Bernhard and replaced by Don Taylor. The reasons for the dismissal are unclear: different “artistic”, contemptuous attitude of the director vis-à-vis the team, stormy discussions with a producer who would have released a pistol from his pocket.
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