Jack’s Return Home (aka Get Carter) by Ted Lewis

If you’ve heard that Ted Lewis’ Jack’s Return Home is one of the grittiest British crime novels ever written – believe it.

Is Jack’s... the original British noir? No. Others got there first, including Gerald Kersh’s 1938 Night and the City.

But are any of the other stories tougher than Lewis’ 1970 book? Put it this way, it would be quite a feat to outdo Jack Carter – an enforcer for two London gangsters – for coolness, street smarts, and violence.

Jack must have rocked many a cozy little English village when it hit the bookshelves.

The story opens with Jack Carter returning to his home town, an industrial city in the north of England, after learning his brother Frank died in a car accident. Jack goes up there to bury Frank and to make sure his teenage niece is all right.

The circumstances of the car crash are fishy. Frank was murdered and Jack sets out to learn why and who did it. This takes him through the seamiest places in the city and to some stately places built by local gangsters – men who Jack knows well from the old days.

Jack, the first-person narrator of the story, is an uneducated poet. He tells his tale in a combination of slangy dialogue and impressionistic images of the cold, wet town.

“The misty rain was dense enough to practically obscure the neighboring blocks. Only dull lights separating soft at the edges were evidence of the other flats,” he says while looking for someone in a public housing project.

A horrible scene is coolly described by Jack when goes to see Albert, a once cocky, small-time hood. Albert is now a broken-down hulk living in a dilapidated house next to a steel mill. A disheveled old lady answers the door. The place smells. A sloppy woman sits on a folding lawn chair near two filthy children. The former tough guy – now only about 40 – is rooted in a chair, drinking. All are watching a crummy TV set. A door to a bedroom opens. A man comes out buttoning his clothes. A woman comes out tying a bathrobe and Albert introduces her as his wife.

Jack’s energy is almost superhuman as he moves around the town getting into multiple fights, putting the clues together and taking his revenge on the men who killed his brother.

Jack’s Return Home was later reissued as Get Carter, the title of the excellent 1972 Michael Caine movie based on the book.

Ted Lewis (1940-1982) grew up in northern England, went to art school, worked in advertising and in animation – including the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine” – and wrote nine novels before dying at age 42.

Flawless is a clever heist film

In the 2007 movie “Flawless,” a night janitor has an improbable plan to rob his employer. The employer is the headquarters of a diamond cartel.

To help him, he recruits a woman executive who is pissed at the company.

The challenge is overwhelming and the twists and turns here are clever and will keep a viewer guessing.

The always terrific Michael Caine as the janitor and Demi Moore as the executive propel this unusual heist picture.

The film was directed by Michael Radford and written by Edward Anderson (who I am pretty sure is not the Edward Anderson who wrote the 1937 crime novel Thieves Like Us.)

“Flawless” is available on the streaming site Kanopy.

Three Spy Films from Len Deighton Novels

Love them, hate them, or never read them, I think most people would agree that the movies made from Len Deighton’s three spy novels, The Ipcress File, Funeral in Berlin, and Billion Dollar Brain, are pretty darn entertaining.

In 1965, Harry Saltzman, the producer of the James Bond films, took on another fictional British agent for a series of very different films – very different from the Bond pictures and very different from each other.

Again, the producer and his people pulled off a casting coup landing young, rising-star Michael Caine to play the spy they named Harry Palmer. In the Deighton books, this character has no name. Caine brought his considerable acting talent and personal charm to the role, which burst through despite a rather restrained, at first, portrayal of the somewhat bland, but deep down rebellious character. Even the heavy, black-rimmed eye glasses he wore in all three pictures could not flatten out his personality.

“The Ipcress File,” the first of the trio, is the story of the British military intelligence service setting out to find a kidnapped scientist. Harry Palmer, who had a crooked reputation while in the regular army, is reassigned to the service where, his stuffy superiors believe, his talents could be better used. The picture was directed by Sidney J. Furie, a Canadian, who gave this film a realistic, cold and claustrophobic atmosphere. Furie was greatly aided by Otto Heller’s photography. Together they employed odd framings and cocked camera angles to keep Harry Palmer, and the audience, off balance and on edge.

In the second film,“Funeral in Berlin” from 1966, Harry Palmer is sent to West Berlin and ordered to cross into Communist controlled East Berlin through Check Point Charlie, to meet a Communist colonel who wants to defect but needs help getting out. Directed by Guy Hamilton, who directed “Goldfinger" in 1964, “Funeral in Berlin” is a smoother production than "Ipcress," but still has a bit of grit and some very good location photography, again by Otto Heller. It also has a wonderful performance by Oscar Homolka as the jovial colonel. Over all, this movie has a lighter feeling than the first.

The last of the three, “Billion Dollar Brain,” from 1967, is the loopiest and slickest of the series. Here, Harry Palmer goes to frozen Finland in the middle of winter to deliver a mysterious package, discover what the package contains (deadly viruses), who wants them (Karl Malden as a slippery middle man), and the ultimate plot of a crazy Texas millionaire out to destroy Communism with the aid of a self-financed army and a computer, the billion-dollar brain of the title. Not much of this one makes sense, but the film is so lavishly produced and so artistically directed by Ken Russell, that the plot did not matter as much as the wild visual ride. “Billion Dollar Brain” is the closest to what the Bond franchise became with beautiful location photography by Billy Williams and a beautiful leading lady in Francoise Dorleac (Catherine Deneuve’s late sister). Oscar Homolka also returns in this one.

The three films showed back-to-back on cable last weekend and gave me the chance to watch “Funeral in Berlin,” which I had never seen before, and which is now my favorite of the three.

I had seen “The Ipcress File” several times, including earlier this year. “Billion Dollar Brain” I had not seen since I was a kid, watching it on TV, and unable to make head or tail of the story. But there was one sequence in it that stuck with me all those years.

When Harry Palmer is given the mysterious package to deliver, his instructions include the warning not to try to open what looks like a coffee thermos. Harry takes it to a London shopping area, enters a shoe store where they have some kind of X-ray device for customers to look down through a viewfinder at their shoes and see the bones in their feet. Harry sticks the thermos in there and has a look. It is still my favorite scene in this oddly funny movie.

(For more posts on movies and television, check out Todd Mason’s blog.)