"The rain rained."
"It hadn't stopped since King's Cross."

So began Ted Lewis's novel Jack's Return Home. That was its title when it was sent to me in 1969 with an offer to script and direct it as my first cinema flick. It was to star Michael Caine. Carter's The Name topped the title page on my first draft. The novel was duly published in 1970 with its original title: then republished in 1971 as Carter. Strange, because by then the film was out and was called Get Carter. Elmore Leonard wouldn't have let that pass.

"I was the only one in the compartment. My slip-ons were off. My feet were up. Penthouse was dead. I'd killed the Standard twice. I had three nails left. Doncaster was 40 minutes off."

That's the third paragraph of the novel; but already my script was deviating. Caine's Carter doesn't bite his nails. He takes white pills, mysterious nose drops, and fastidiously wipes his implements in the restaurant car of the train.This Carter is obsessional. This Carter reads a classy pulp paperback by Raymond Chandler, not because I wanted to compare him to Chandler's hero as some dumb critics suggested, but as a portent. I knew Carter wouldn't live to see the end credits; indeed they would roll up over his dead body. I also knew that the hitman who was to blow him away, is sitting in the corner of the same compartment, already on his tail like a homing missile. The paperback is Farewell My Lovely.

" 'Pint of bitter,' I said. He lets his arms unfold, reached out for a pint mug and made his weary way to the pumps, and without putting anything more into it than it needed he began to pull a pint 'In a thin glass please' I said."

Caine's Carter points and doesn't say 'please'. If he had, I might have been spared twenty-five years of macho men, on learning I made the film, snapping their fingers at me with the same sinister authority. No wonder it was serialised in Loaded magazine last year, as a comic strip.

These examples of the many small changes between novel and script (all I hasten to add approved by Ted Lewis) leads inevitably to the big one. The locating of the story itself; the place where Carters's roots rotted as a child and adolescent; the blast furnace where his hardness and anger was cast.

"Doncaster Station. Gloomy wide windy areas of rails and platforms overhung with concrete and faint neon. Rain noiselessly emphasising the emptiness. The roller front of WH Smith's pulled hard down.
I walked along the enclosed overhead corridor that led to the platform where my connection was waiting."

The connection leaves for we know not where. A steel town with no name. I can't remember why I didn't locate the film in a steel town. Maybe because I didn't know any, I spent my early life in the chocolate box environs of Salisbury and Bath; cities with soft centres. My blinkers were ripped away when I belatedly did my National Service at twenty-two. By some freak I ended up in the Royal Navy as an ordinary seaman. Few conscripts ended up in the navy; only I and one other joined HMS Coquette, and later HMS Wave, were both leaders of the Fishery Protection Fleet. They took me to yhe Arctic and to Iceland at the fag-end of the fish wars; but more importantly into every fishing port in the UK. Ashore, safe inside my matelots uniform, I melted into a world of brutal Hogarthian intensity and was mesmerised. These were places 1 kept thinking of as I read Jack's Return Home.

Lowestoft. Grimsby. Hull. Each had been decimated by deveiopers.The pubs, cafes and dodgy boarding houses gone. Thirteen years had passed.The producer Michael Klinger had insisted that he, his driver and Yank car take me on my recce up the East coast. My embarrassment, riding into these places in a Cadillac matched only my despair at what I was seeing through its tinted windows. On the brink of returning South, I remembered sailing into North Shields. My memories of it were vivid. We pressed on and came to Newcastle. The visual drama of the place took my breath away. Seeing the great bridges crossing the Tyne, the waterfront, the terraced houses stepped up each side of the deep valley, I knew that Jack was home. And although the developers were breathing down the Scotswood Road, they hadn't yet gobbled it up. We'd got there in time. But only just.

Now the film was about to part company with the novel. I began to weave into the script the amazing backdrop I had come upon. The pub opposite the station, reputed to have the longest bar in Europe, where Carter forgot to say please. Incidentally, the really observant will spot that the old man supping his brown ate has one finger more than the prescribed four! In the novel the big shoot-up between Carter, Con McCarty and Peter the Dutchman, the boys sent from London to bring him back, took place outside Albert Swift's run-down house. In the film it's set around the ferry boat between North and South Shields. The Tyne Bridge is used for Carter's meeting with Margaret, his dead brother's girlfriend. The Swing Bridge on which buys heroin to kill her and implicate Cyril Kinnear.

"Cyril Kinnear was very, very fat. He was the kind of man that fat men tike to stand next to. He had no hair and a handlebar moustache that his face made look a foot long on each side. In one way it was a very pleasant face, the face of a wealthy farmer or of an ex-Indian army officer in the used car business, but the trouble was he had eyes like a ferret's."

Kinnear is played by John Osborne, famous author of plays and scripts such as Look Back In Anger, Tom Jones and The Charge of the Light Brigade. Osborne was tall, thin and hirsute. Re-reading the novel I now remember it wasn't just the locations I changed. Instead of Carter bumping into Eric Paice in a pub, I set the scene at the racetrack, A wonderful betting shop I found in South Shields is where he finally catches up with Albert and knifes him to death. Here, a blind man laying a bet represents those characters in the film who literally turn a blind eye to what is going on around them. Much like the last eighteen years in Britain.

The high-rise car park and restaurant, the epicentre of Cliff Brumby's shaky empire, the ugly unfinished concrete shell from which Carter tips him, I found in Gateshead. When Brumby's architects hear the approaching police sirens, one turns to the other and says:

"I'm not sure we're going to get our fees tor this one".

At the time, I didn't realise how close I was sailing to the truth.Years later I was told the building had already been condemned as unsafe and was now demolished. True or not, it certainly felt right. Indeed, the more I explored the dark corners of the North East, the more I began to sense the sickly smell of corruption. It was a smell I recognised: in the midsixties I'd been a producer/director on World In Action, Granada's investigative TV programme. Instinct now drove me to look closer at a murder committed in Newcastle three years earlier. The body of Angus Sibbert had been found in a Jaguar parted under a bridge close to La Doice Vita night club. He'd been shot. Two men, Dennis Stafford and Michael Luvaglio, were arrested and convicted. It was the motive for this killing that provided much background detail in the film, as well as an important location - Cyril Kinnear's home.

It is ironic that Dryderdale Hall, previously the residence of Vincent Lander (the older brother of convicted murderer Luvaglio himself a local fruit machine tycoon who ended up on the run with his family for fraud) should become the fictional home of the film's arch villain Cyril Kinnear.We had to do very little to make it convincing. When Carter runs the gauntlet of Kinnear's bodyguards and burst into the house, he hides in a back room pressing himself against the wall. Look closely and you'll see the wall is papered with a kid's pattern of 'cowboys and indians'. This reference to the myths of the western wasn't artful direction. It was already there.

"I hear him jump down on the other side andbegin to walkaway. Then there is a silence for a long time until I hear the car door slam again and the engine starts up and listen to the sound until it goes away and then there is nothing, nothing at all."

So ends Jack's Return Home. Samuel Beckett wrote: "In the beginning is the end - but we still go on." And so it is with Caine's Carter. He's shot dead before our eyes, but still goes on. He is, of course, eternal; he's on film.

(extracts taken from Mike Hodges, Crime Time Issue 9)

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