Classic gangster film 'Get Carter' on C5 yesterday

[max_tranmere]

I actually like the Long Good Friday. Aswell as being a good film (in my view) it is also good as a photographic record of a London that has now gone. You see, in great detail, the Canary Wharf area of the West India Docks, before they put those massive towers up. At the beginning of the 1980's, when LGF was filmed, you see the quay sides, and some are bare, and some have two-storey Victorian warehouses, that are very long, adorning them. Now there are about 8 mammoth towers, three of which are still (I think) the tallest buildings in Europe, and some of the docks themselves have shrunk considerably as the quaysides were extended to build these things. It's nice that the 'old London' was immortalised on film before it went.

[colonel]

Playwright John Osborne in a rare acting role- bringing no 'previous' to the audience- as the mastermind

Bryan 'Alf Roberts' Mosley falling off a multi-storey car park.

Dave from the Winchester Club being stabbed as a nonce.

Surely in the Top 10 best British films of all time.

I regret the sequel was never made- in which Emily Bishop, Harold Pinter and Arfur Daley team up to get justice for the dead.

[Robches]

steve56 wrote:

> Stonedfaced he drowns Geraldine Moffat in the bath saw her in a
> old episode of Within These Walls over the weekend.

No, he doesn't drown her in the bath, she's alive as he needs her, that's why he stuffs her in the boot of the car. However, the "baddies" shove the car into the Tyne with her in it. Jack looks more pissed off about losing the car.

One piece of the film which makes me laugh is when he sends a copy of the blue movie to the "Vice Squad, New Scotland Yard." What did he think they would do with it? In 1970 those bastards were as bent as buggery, they would all have been on a nice drink from the syndicate, but I suppose the film makers would not have expected that to have been common knowledge.

One thing about the film which strikes me now is that the police are straight. When Jack sets up Kinnear at the drugs orgy at his big house in the country, they come out and bust it. Given the cesspool of corruption in Newcastle politics at the time, I would imagine that half of the CID would have been guests at a party like that!

"Get Carter" is good, but it couldn't show the half of what went on.

[Jonone]

If the corruption pervades the whole of the organisation nothing would have been done about it and the situation would still prevail. Rather than a few 'bad apples' the bent coppers are a sizable and influential minority, but it shouldn't be forgotten that there are still a majority of 'straight' and principled coppers.

Corruption prospers through cliques and cabals which the great majority are not part of.

[Robches]

Jonone wrote:

> If the corruption pervades the whole of the organisation
> nothing would have been done about it and the situation would
> still prevail.

That was the case with the Met's Vice Squad. It could not be reformed, the whole culture of the unit was bent, and it had to be disbanded in the 70's. A new uniformed unit was started from scratch. What was found was that even though all the detectives in the Vice Squad were not bent, the straight ones still knew what was going on, and had to cover for it, so everyone was tainted. Quite a few ended up inside, including senior officers.

I think it shows how stupid and corrupting it is to try and outlaw a product which people want, and are wiling to pay for. There will always be money around to pay off cops, and there will always be cops around willing to take the pay off.

[jj]

IIRC it was released shortly before the T. Dan Smith/Poulson
thing blew up.