A filmography in the end little nourished, an unforgettable title, a few pearls, one or two amusing curiosities. This is how one could describe the career of English director Mike Hodges, who died on December 17, at the age of 90, in the county of Dorset, in the south-west of the United Kingdom.
He was born in Bristol on July 29, 1932. After starting out as a chartered accountant, he served two years in the Royal Navy. It will participate in demining actions in many ports in the north of Great Britain. He will say later that this experience had made him an angry young man, the witness of a world of scarcity and misery. He then entered television, where he first worked as a teleprompter operator. He progressed rapidly in the hierarchy and found himself writing screenplays, producing and directing documentary programs on political and cultural news. It is after seeing rumor, television drama directed by him for the series ITV Playhouse, that Michael Caine, who started producing with Michael Klinger, decided to offer him, in 1971, the film adaptation of a novel for which he had bought the rights, Get Carter, by Ted Lewis (published in France in 1996 by Rivages).
A tale of revenge
The Law of the Middle (Get Carter), the first feature film for the cinema by Mike Hodges, can be considered one of the peaks of British crime film. It’s a tale of revenge set in the middle of Newcastle gangsters, delivered with grit and realism. Michael Caine embodies a character cold and devoid of any emotion, a pure machine devoid of empathy, guided by his libido and a kind of cold and cynical rage, determined to find those responsible for the death of his brother. The pulsating music of Roy Budd accompanies this journey into the hellish industrial city of northern England. After the commercial success of the film, Hodges turns again with Michael Caine. Deadly retreat (pulp), in 1972, still produced by the actor and Michael Klinger, will be a kind of ironic mise en abyme (perhaps a little too much) featuring a writer of detective novels in search of the man’s killers, an actor specializing in the gangster roles and embodied by Mickey Rooney, whom he was to help write his autobiography.
The sci-fi thriller adapted from a novel by Michael Crichton, terminal man, made in 1974, will be a commercial failure, but will earn him the admiration of Stanley Kubrick. Hodges was then offered to direct the sequel to Richard Donner’s horror hit, The curse. He begins filming Damian. The Curse 2 before being fired by producer Harvey Bernhard and replaced by Don Taylor. The reasons for dismissal are unclear: different “artistic”contemptuous attitude of the director towards the team, stormy discussions with a producer who would have taken a gun out of his pocket.
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