As Carter himself says to a woman, about his brother, "I was always the villain in this family."
We are rooting for Carter to get everybody he needs to for revenge -- zeroing in ultimately on Eric after Brumby and Albert(who seems a poor, innocent soul right before Carter viciously kills him by knife after implying he would let him survive if he gave up information but hey -- Albert WAS in that porn film with Carter's niece.)
But in his villainy -- along the way we watch him semi-drown and manhandle one woman (who dies in the car trunk he put her in when the car is pushed by others into the reiver) and force another woman to strip before pinning her down and injecting her with a lethal overdose.
In those actions, Carter abandons being an "anti-hero"(which allows for SOME decency and heroics) and becomes very muc a villain who we watch in full knowledge that he is an evil man at heart, a ruthless killer and probably a psychopath.
Interesting: Get Carter came out in 1971. Also in 1971, Alfred Hitchcock offered Michael Caine the lead in his proposed movie "Frenzy." Hitchcock was offering Caine a "psycho role" ala Anthony Perkins in Psycho, but this one was R-rated: a modern-day London-based psychopath who rapes women and then strangles them to death with a necktie. Caine wrote in one of his autobiographies "I didn't want to be associated with that part." Fair enough, but in Get Carter we see glimpses of how Caine would have played the "Frenzy" psycho in how he mandhandles and kills women. I suppose the difference in Frenzy is that the female victims are innocent and arbitrary. The women Caine kills in Get Carter are complicit and tied to the mob.
Some years after turning down ?Frenzy" -- when when his career was ridding with flops -- Caine would take a coupla of psycho ladykiller parts....
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Dolemite (87)
5 months ago
Well put. What he did to Margaret (the one whom he injects with a heroin overdose) I found particularly evil. The way that he kidnaps her and almost casually keeps her captive for what must have been an hour or more (she must have been terrified during that time), even stopping to make a phone call on the way to where he is going to murder her. Then he quite calmly and almost casually injects her with that drugs overdose as if he is just carrying out an everyday chore (to me certainly the act of a psychopath).
Any sympathy which I might have had for him evaporated after that.
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roger1 (3692)
5 months ago
What he did to Margaret (the one whom he injects with a heroin overdose) I found particularly evil. The way that he kidnaps her and almost casually keeps her captive for what must have been an hour or more (she must have been terrified during that time), even stopping to make a phone call on the way to where he is going to murder her. Then he quite calmly and almost casually injects her with that drugs overdose as if he is just carrying out an everyday chore (to me certainly the act of a psychopath).
Any sympathy which I might have had for him evaporated after that
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And he also forces her to strip down -- to underwear -- another outrage.
Earlier in the film when he only had SUSPICIONS about her involvement in his brother's death, he grabbed her and got physical with her too (slapped her? I can't remember.)
"Any sympathy which I might have held for him evaporated after that."
Me, too. But I suppose the film was showing that being a woman did NOT save either Margaret or the one he half-drowns in her bathtub "when his rage was on." He attacked them with the same fury or cold murderousness that he did the men.
So...hero. No. Villain. Yes -- in his trade as a gangster and towards the women. Anti-hero -- oh, I suppose we all enjoyed the brutal spectacle of watching him mete out deadly punishment to the MEN.
By way of comparison, look at how "cleaned up and chivalrous" Sly Stallone plays Carter in the Americanized remake.
PS. Given his scene killing Margaret, I really don't see how Michael Caine saw the psycho sex killer in Frenzy as all that worse...
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