A SERIES of events will mark the 40th anniversary of one of the best films set in the region.
Get Carter director Mike Hodges will be guest of honour at a screening of the film at the Tyneside Cinema in Newcastle on March 13.
In an echo of scenes featuring Michael Caine’s Jack Carter character as he travels from London to Newcastle, Mr Hodges will also be filmed on the train by Northern Stars, a group of young film makers based at the Tyneside Cinema.
In the years since its release in 1971, the Tyneside-set film has won almost universal acclaim as the finest crime thriller to come from a United Kingdom director, and one of the best ever British films of any genre.
Mr Hodges has said: “It was important that Jack Carter came from a hard, deprived background, a place he never wanted to go back to. The only place was Newcastle. I fell in love with it as soon as I saw it.”
Get Carter broke barriers and had a huge influence on British crime drama on film and TV.
Created in collaboration between several North East cultural organisations, supported by Northern Film & Media and sponsored by East Coast Trains, the anniversary screening is one of a number of Get Carter- themed events in March at the Tyneside Cinema and in landmark locations across the city.
Media historian and former Lindisfarne drummer Ray Laidlaw is putting together a special, two-hour long, Get Carter location tour.
And The Tyneside Cinema will be showing a season of Hodges’ major film and TV work from March 10-16. The season will feature films which share similar themes or origins to Get Carter. Newcastle-based music development agency Generator is also inviting musicians and re-mixers to create a new twist on Roy Budd’s Get Carter soundtrack by entering a competition to reinterpret his original film score.
It is also hoped that some of the new mixes will be played at the Tyneside Cinema during the anniversary screenings.
The cinema will stage an exhibition of artwork and original stills from the film, drawn from the collection of Get Carter book author and Professor of British Cinema Steve Chibnall.
There will also be projections of Sally Ann Norman’s film No Parking, about the now demolished Get Carter car park in Gateshead.
Chris Phipps, who lives in Washington, said: “We are finalising the Get Carter tour route, which will offer something for the hardened fan and also for the casual film goer.
“It will be a combination of locations in which Jack Carter walked and others which sum up the essence of and are evocative of the film.”
