MIKE HODGES

(29 July 1932 - 17 December 2022)

The screenwriter and film and TV director Mike Hodges, who has died of heart failure at the age of 90, had the distinction of creating the film of Ted Lewis’s novel Jack’s Return Home in 1971. As Get Carter, the crime thriller about a London gangster returning home to Newcastle to investigate his brother’s suspicious death, became a classic of the genre. With Michael Caine as Jack Carter, it could hardly fail as his track record in Zulu, Alfie, The Italian Job and The Ipcress File had made him a major star. The film was written and shot by Mike Hodges soon after the book’s publication and completed in only ten months.

Before that, Hodges had begun in television in 1968 with The Tyrant King, a children’s television serial. Born Michael Tommy Hodges in Bristol, he at first trained as a chartered accountant before National Service in the Royal Navy. Later on, he became a teleprompter operator for television and started to write TV scripts, becoming a producer-director for ABC TV on news, religious and arts programmes. This led to his writing and directing the thrillers Suspect and Rumour (the founding basis of Euston Films) which led to Get Carter.

Following the success of Get Carter he worked on Pulp (1972), again with Caine, The Terminal Man (1974) with George Segal, Damien: Omen II (1977), which Hodges only scripted, and then Flash Gordon (1980). Described as a space opera, this was based on the King Features comics which became movie serials in the 1930s, with Flash and his cohorts battling against Emperor Ming the Merciless on the planet Mongo. With music by Queen, it was only a success in the UK and Italy but later assumed cult status. After that, Hodges’ career was a mixture of good and bad choices. Morons from Outer Space (1985) was pretty feeble, A Prayer for the Dying (1987), an IRA-based thriller with Mickey Rourke, had its problems, Black Rainbow (1989) with Rosanna Arquette as a clairvoyant had a limited release, but Croupier (1998) with Clive Owen fared well in the US, winning praise for its film noir touches. Clive Owen also starred in I’ll Sleep When I'm Dead (2003), Hodges’ last feature, a plot similar to Get Carter, in that the hero is looking for his brother’s killer.

Mike Hodges did other work on TV, in theatre and on radio, and authored a trio of novellas, Bait, Grist and Security. His first marriage was to Jean Alexandrov and they have two sons, Ben and Jake. They divorced in 1982 and he married Carol Laws in 2004.

MICHAEL DARVELL