Of cult gangster films and the adornment of dorm walls

To all my North American readers, though residents of other nations may have run into this phenomenon too, I'd like to ask you to bring yourself back to three iconic images which you see again and again on bedroom walls of those between the ages of 14-29 and in especially high concentration in "counterculture" poster shops as well as dorm rooms.

You've got your Scarface.

Then you've got your classic Pulp Fiction and your "Jules and Vincent" Pulp Fiction poster.

To a lesser degree you have your Goodfellas and your Godfather, but these three posters are the truly ubiquitous ones.

So yes, you certainly see them in England but there is one homegrown film which has a similar role.

(Micheal Caine is) Get Carter

Coming here I kind of remembered that there had been such a film, but only thanks to the shit-awful American remake from 2000 starring Sylvester Stallone, his then dying career. But when I started exploring film circles, book shops, poster shops, theater bars and the like I noticed one image kept coming up again and again.
Generally in black and white, sometimes in color, this is the most highly reproduced image from the film. From everything I'd read and all the evidence of the staying power this film has had in the popular culture of England, I'd say this is one of the essential English gangster films. You can read a synopsis and get a bunch of trivia at the site I linked to (or good old Wikipedia, of course). Maybe even IMDB, but why would you want to hurt your eyes on such an ugly website? (I mean really, is it just me or is it about as aesthetically pleasing as a Dee-Lites' video?).

What I'll tell you is my own reaction to the film, which I decided to pick up a couple months back when I'd noticed this very image stenciled on a wall near Leicester square (didn't have my camera at the time and, sadly, it had been obliterated by the time I came that way again). Like a lot of films older than about twenty years, the pacing can feel slow at times. But it's the steady building of an incredible momentum that carries you through the last third of the movie with an intensity that's impossible to ignore. It raises questions in you, early on, that you have to have answered. Best of all, it warrants repeat viewings and not just for film nerds who want to study it.

I'd seen Alfie not long before Get Carter and what struck me was how similar Alfie and Carter were and how these similarities highlighted the contrasts. Both characters are very sure of themselves and quick to assert control over any situation they find themselves in. Both cast a hard exterior and yet obviously are very sensitive to a few, highly specific facets of life. The differences lay, of course, in how they enact these characteristics and the fates their behavior brings them too.

I strongly recommend watching the two films back to back, which shouldn't be hard as any video store that carries classic Caine will have both. Anyways, enough of that then!

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Meanwhile, I'm blatantly stealing this clip from Posterchild's site. Just to warn you, it does feature scenes of (albeit animated) torture.

He put it up because of the stencil technique employed. I'm putting it up because I found it to be a suitably gripping piece of film work and an interesting angle on a well worked subject, an angle which I feel runs parallel to Adam Curtis' take on similar matters.