Get Carter, starring Michael Caine and hailed as one of the best British crime films ever made, was Hodges’ first feature picture.
Mike Hodges, the British director responsible for Get Carter and Flash Gordon, has passed away.
According to NBC News, Hodges died of heart failure at his home in Dorset at the age of 90, as reported by his friend Mike Kaplan.
Get Carter (1971), hailed as one of the greatest British crime films ever made, was Hodges’ debut feature picture, adapted from his novel in under eight months.
A London criminal played by Michael Caine travels home to Newcastle to attend his brother’s funeral.
In a 50th anniversary tribute last year, the British Picture Institute praised the film’s “masterful, fast-paced blend of the sex, violence, and style that repels and attracts crime film experts while offering much more.”
In the 1980 cult classic space opera Flash Gordon, he directed Sam J. Jones is the comic book hero.
Hodges was hired to replace Nicolas Roeg as director, but he had “no idea what I was going to accomplish,” he told.
“I believe this contributed to the success of the film. It resembles a souffle. We succeeded to include the correct elements, and it rose fascinatingly.”
Born in Bristol on 29 July 1932, Hodges completed two years of national service in the Navy before becoming a chartered accountant.
He later claimed that the encounter radically altered his perspective on the world.
In a letter published in The Guardian in May, Hodges stated, “My middle-class eyes were forced to witness appalling poverty and hardship of which I was previously ignorant.”
He remarked, “I entered the navy as a newly-qualified chartered accountant and a young, smug Tory, and I left as an angry, radical young man.”
Hodges began his television career as a teleprompter operator and went on to develop and direct Pulp (1972), The Terminal Man (1974), and Black Rainbow (1980). (1989).
A Prayer for the Dying (1987), Croupier (1998), and I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead are subsequent films by Hodges (2003).
