Mike Hodges, the British director known for films such as Get Carter, Croupier, The Terminal Man and Flash Gordon, has died at the age of 90.
Mike Kaplan, a longtime friend and producer of Hodges’ latest feature I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead, confirmed his death to The Guardian. Hodges died on Saturday at his home in Dorset. The cause of death was not given.
Hodges’ career was completed with British gangster films: Get Carter (1971) and Pulp (1972), then Croupier (1998) and his final film I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead (2003) . He was also known for his cult classic Flash Gordon.
Born in Bristol in 1932, Hodges first worked as a chartered accountant, then spent two years serving on a Royal Navy minesweeper around the fishing ports of northern England. It was there that he “witnessed[ed] an awful poverty and privation of which I had never before known,” an experience he later said he had reported to Get Carter. “I went into the navy as a newly qualified chartered accountant and a complacent young Tory,” he wrote in a letter to the Guardian, “and I came out as an angry, radical young man.”
Hodges entered show business as a teleprompter operator on British television, where he was able to observe how television was made. He began writing scripts and soon his talent saw him move into producing and directing news series and documentaries. He wrote, directed and produced two thrillers for ITV Playhouse, Rumor and Suspect, in 1969 and 1970, which led to him being approached to adapt Ted Lewis’ novel Get Carter.
Hodges on the set of the 1971 film Get Carter, with Michael Caine and Ian Hendry. Photography: Metro/Allstar
With a working-class background in northern England, Michael Caine plays the 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 regarded as England’s answer to The Godfather. The following year, Hodges and Caine reunited for their next film, Pulp, which saw Caine play an author who is asked to ghostwrite the memoirs of an aging actor famous for playing gangsters (Mickey Rooney) and suspected of having real ties. gangsters When the actor is killed, Caine’s character goes in search of the killer.
Hodges’ 1974 film The Terminal Man was loosely adapted from a Michael Crichton novel, in which a computer scientist collapses after electrodes are 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 “brilliant”, and Terrence Malick, who wrote to Hodges: I just saw The Terminal Man and I want you to know what a magnificent and overwhelming picture it is… Your pictures make me understand what a picture is.’ Malick’s letter was later used in an advertisement for the film.
Hodges co-wrote and directed the 1978 horror film Damien: Omen 2, but left the project after three weeks on set. Hodges claimed that a producer pulled out a loaded gun and placed it on the table during a heated conversation about budgets. “I found it very scary, I must confess. The whole film was very threatening,” he told the Guardian in 2003. “I should never have taken on this film in the first place. I needed the money, and everything was a disaster. The gun was accidental.”
Hodges made the space opera Flash Gordon in 1980, which was brought in 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 and it rose, in some mysterious way.”
Mike Hodges on the set of Flash Gordon with actor Sam Jones. Photograph: Ronald Grant
It was around this time that Hodges “rejected materialism in any excessive form”, having gone through a divorce which he said “partly came from struggling to maintain a lifestyle for the family”.
“I found myself doing all the things I swore I’d never do,” she said in 2003. “The kids went to private school, we had the cottage and the townhouse and two cars and God knows how many TVs. . in every room . . . once you remove all the pressures and worries about money, you immediately feel freer. And then you can start making the movies you really want to make.”
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He directed the 1987 Mickey Rourke thriller A Prayer for the Dying, but later disavowed it, saying he had no control over the editing. His 1989 film Black Rainbow, starring Rosanna Arquette as a mysterious medium who catches the attention of a reporter when she seems to predict a violent murder, didn’t make much of an impact when its distributors ran into financial difficulties. “By the time I did Black Rainbow I was used to it,” Hodges told the Guardian in 2020. “I was quite angry, of course, but there we go. One of those things.”
His 1998 film Croupier, starring Clive Owen as a gambling dealer who is then forced to rob her, bombed in the UK. Hodges assumed his career was over and decided to retire. But the film was screened in the US to rave reviews and its success there earned it a second release in the UK. “You think your film goes down the toilet and then it gets stuck. And then it comes back up,” he told the Guardian in 2003.
Hodges came out of semi-retirement to reunite with Owen in his last film in 2003, I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead, with Owens playing a notorious criminal out for revenge after his younger brother (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) is raped by a London Gangster (Malcolm McDowell). The Guardian called the film “surprisingly bleak; a no-frills existential gangster tale that, at its best, exudes the same reptilian menace [Hodges] was shown in Get Carter. Without a doubt, it touches on similar themes: honor, revenge, male violence.”
Hodges experienced a late burst of appreciation in the last two decades of his life, as his films that were plagued by distribution problems in the 1970s and 1980s were restored and re-released. “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 almost too late.”
But Hodges had no intention of returning to film and in 2020 said he was happy growing vegetables at his home in Dorset and writing dark fiction; published a novel, Watching The Wheels Come Off, in 2010, and a collection of novels, 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.