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A local cinephile club, Film Geeks San Diego, among other events they hold presents a year-long film festival hosted by the local micro-theater Digital Gym. Last year’s festival celebrated the 70th anniversary of the king of the monsters Godzilla and after a tie vote this year’s has two themes, neo-noir and Foreign Horror. The festival kicked off with the British neo-noir Get Carter.

MGM-EMI

Adapted from the novel Jack’s Return Home, the film follows Jack Carter (Michael Caine) returning to his hated hometown of Newcastle in the north of England to investigate the mysterious death of his brother. Jack, a mob enforcer, stirs up trouble with both the local criminal underworld and his employers to discover the truth about his brother’s automobile ‘accident.’

Both Director Mike Hodges and cinematographer Wolfgang Suschitzky history of working with documentaries provide them with the skills to present Get Carter in a realistic and dirty manner. This is not a movie the idealizes its gangster characters or their lives but rather shows that their world is red in tooth and claw where life is nasty, brutish, and short. Jack is no hero. His motivations are purely familial and the pain, suffering, and death that follow in his wake have little weight on his conscience. The story and the mood remain deeply cynical right to the film’s dark and uncompromising final shots.

I have seen Get Carter before, at home on DVD but even in a tiny theater the film exudes power on this large screen that is often absent when viewed casually in the living room.

There have been two other cinematic adaptation of this novel a remake with the same title in 2000 starring Sylvester Stallone which jettisons much of the cynicism that make the British film so powerful and a blaxploitation adaptation The Hitman in 1972. (I must hunt that one down.)

Next month the festival continues with the 1955 French film Diabolique.