Mike Hodges, the British director known for films such as Get Carter, Croupier, The Terminal Man and Flash Gordon, has died aged 90.
Mike Kaplan, a longtime friend and producer of Hodges’ last feature film, I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead, confirmed his death to the Guardian. Hodges died at his home in Dorset on Saturday. The cause of death was not given.
Hodges’ career was associated with British gangster films: Get Carter (1971) and Pulp (1972), then Croupier (1998) and his last film I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead (2003). He was also known for his camp cult classic Flash Gordon.
Born in Bristol in 1932, Hodges first worked as a chartered accountant before spending two years serving as a Royal Navy minesweeper around the fishing ports of northern England. It was there that he “witnessed[ed] appalling poverty and deprivation that I didn’t know about before,” an experience he later said informed Get Carter. “I went into the navy a newly qualified chartered accountant and a smug young Tory,” he wrote in a letter to the Guardian, “and came out an angry, radical young man.”
Hodges on the set of the 1971 film Get Carter with Michael Caine and Ian Hendry. Photo: Metro/Allstar
Hodges entered show business as a teleprompter operator on British television, where he could observe how television was made. He began writing screenplays and soon his talent led him to produce and direct news and documentary series. He wrote, directed and produced two thrillers for ITV Playhouse, entitled Rumor and Suspect, in 1969 and 1970, which led to him being tapped to adapt Ted Lewis’ novel Get Carter.
Set against the backdrop of working-class northern England, Michael Caine plays the titular London gangster who seeks his own form of justice after his brother is murdered in Newcastle. Released in 1971, Get Carter was a huge hit and was soon considered England’s answer to The Godfather. The following year, Hodges and Caine reunited for their next film, Pulp, in which Caine plays an author who is asked to ghostwrite the memoirs of an aging actor known for playing gangsters (Mickey Rooney) and suspected of having connections with real gangsters. When the actor is murdered, Kane’s character goes on the hunt for the killer.
Hodges’ 1974 film The Terminal Man is a loose adaptation of Michael Crichton’s novel, in which a computer scientist goes on a rampage after having electrodes implanted in his brain. The film performed poorly in the US due to distribution problems, but won Hodges the admiration of Stanley Kubrick, who called the film “great”, and Terrence Malick, who wrote to Hodges, “I just came from seeing The Terminal Man and I want to you know what a gorgeous stunning picture it is… Your images make me understand what an image is. Malik’s letter was later used in a commercial for the film.
Hodges then made the space opera Flash Gordon in 1980 after director Nicolas Roeg left the project. “I had no idea what I was going to do when I took over,” he told the Guardian in 2020. “I think that’s part of the success of the film. It’s like a soufflé. We managed to put all the right ingredients together and it just kind of happened, in some mysterious way.”
At the time, Hodges “rejected materialism in any excessive form” after going through a divorce, which he says “partly came from struggling to maintain a lifestyle for the family.”
“I found myself doing all the things I swore I’d never do,” he said in 2003. room… once you remove all the pressure and worry about money, you immediately feel freer. And then you can start making the movies you really want to make.
Hodges co-wrote and was set to direct the 1978 horror film Damien: The Omen 2, but left the project after three weeks on set. Hodges claims a producer pulled out a loaded gun and placed it on the table during a heated conversation about the budget. “I found it very scary, I must admit. The whole film was very threatening,” he told the Guardian in 2003. “I shouldn’t have been involved with that film at all. I needed the money and everything was a disaster. The gun was accidental.”
He directed Mickey Rourke’s 1987 thriller A Prayer for the Dying, but later disowned it, saying he had no control over the editing. His 1989 film Black Rainbow, starring Roseanne Arquette as a mysterious medium who attracts the attention of a journalist when she appears to predict a violent murder, failed to make much of an impact at the time after its distributors ran into financial difficulties . “By the time I did Black Rainbow I was kind of used to it,” Hodges told the Guardian in 2020. “I was pretty angry, of course, but there you go. One of those things.
His 1998 film Croupier, starring Clive Owens as a dealer in a gambling den who is then involved in a heist there, bombed in the UK. Hodges decided his career was over and decided to retire. But the film was screened in the US to rave reviews and became the biggest independent film of the year. Croupier’s success in the US led to the film’s second release in the UK. “You think your film is going down the toilet and then it gets stuck. And then it comes back again,” he told the Guardian in 2003.
Hodges came out of semi-retirement to reunite with Owens in the 2003 gangster film I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead, in which Owens plays a revenge-hungry criminal after his younger brother (Jonathan Rhys-Myers) is raped by a Londoner gangster (Malcolm McDowell). The Guardian called the film “strikingly bleak; an unassuming existential gangster story that at its best exudes the same reptilian menace [Hodges] featured on Get Carter. It certainly touches on similar themes: honor, revenge, male violence.
Hodges experienced a late renaissance in the last two decades of his life, as his films, which were affected by distribution problems in the 1970s and 1980s, were restored and reissued. “He’s a rare bird in British cinema and I’m glad he’s getting some recognition,” McDowell, a long-time friend of Hodges, told the Guardian in 2003. “I’m angry it’s taken 35 years, but that’s typical of England. We never realize what we have until it’s too late.”
But Hodges had no intention of returning to filmmaking and said in 2020 that he was happy growing vegetables at his home in Dorset and writing noir fiction; he published a novel Watching The Wheels Come Off in 2010 and a collection of short stories titled Bait, Grist and Security in 2018.
He is survived by his wife Carol Laws, sons Ben and Jake and five grandchildren, Marlon, Honey, Orson, Michael and Gabriel.
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