Mike Hodges, who made his feature debut by writing and directing the seminal British gangster film Get Carter, starring Michael Caine, then replaced Nicolas Roeg to helm the cult sci-fi hit Flash Gordon, has died. He was 90.
Hodges died Saturday of heart failure at his home in Dorset, England, confirmed his friend Mike Kaplan, who produced Hodges’ film I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead.
The British filmmaker also wrote and directed Pulp (1972) in a quick follow-up with Caine; the bleak The Terminal Man (1974), an adaptation of a Michael Crichton novel that starred George Segal; Damien: Omen II (1978), though he was fired three weeks into the shoot and replaced by Don Taylor; and Black Rainbow (1989), starring Rosanna Arquette as a medium.
In addition, Hodges helmed the Mickey Rourke-starring IRA thriller A Prayer for the Dying (1987), which he said was re-edited without his knowledge (he tried to have his name excised from that movie), and two films starring Clive Owen: Croupier (1998) and I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead (2003).
Hodges, who got his start in British documentary television, landed the gig on Get Carter (1971) when producer Michael Klinger was impressed with his work on the 1970 ITV Playhouse telefilm Rumour. Shot on film and outside the confines of a studio, it centered on a tabloid journalist (Michael Coles) drawn into a political conspiracy after the death of a prostitute.
His experience in television taught him to work quickly on Get Carter. He got a hold of Ted Lewis’ novel Jack’s Return Home in January 1970 “and had written the script and was shooting in July,” he said in a 2012 BFI interview.
Starring Caine as hitman Jack Carter, who returns to Newcastle for his brother’s funeral, uncovers a ring of pornographers involved with his death and hunts them down, the neo-noir classic was shot in 45 days for £750,000 (about $16 million today). In 1999, it ranked 16th on the list of the 100 best British films of all time by Sight and Sound.
On Flash Gordon (1980), starring Sam J. Jones as the comic strip hero, Hodges accepted producer Dino De Laurentiis’ invitation to replace Roeg but 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 souffle. We managed to put all the right ingredients in, and it sort of rose in some mysterious way.”
Hodges said he once asked De Laurentiis why he chose him for the project. “I thought he’d say, ‘Hey, Mike, I liked Get Carter, I liked Terminal Man, [you’re a] great filmmaker,’ he recalled. “Instead, he said, ‘Hey, Mike, I liked your face.’”
Michael Tommy Hodges was born on July 29, 1932, in Bristol, England, and raised in Salisbury. An unhappy experience at the Prior Park College boarding school run by Christian Brothers in Bath turned him against religion.
He studied to be an accountant, spent two years in the Royal Navy on the lower deck of a minesweeper that visited British ports and then served as a technician on the Associated British Corp. series Armchair Theatre.
In two years on the Granada Television current affairs program World in Action, Hodges filmed in Vietnam and interviewed American politician Barry Goldwater and union organizers in Detroit. He then moved to the highbrow Sunday afternoon ITN show Tempo, where he profiled the likes of Harold Pinter, Orson Welles, Jean-Luc Godard and Lee Strasberg.
He directed the six-part Thames Television children’s serial The Tyrant King in 1967 and two ITV Playhouse telefilms, 1969’s Suspect and Rumour.
In a 2021 BFI interview, Hodges called his experience on Get Carter “truly extraordinary, because it was done in a kind of white heat.”
“Richard Lester, who was a friend of mine, gave me a tip, which was a very wise one,” he added. “He said, ‘Make sure you stay in a different hotel to the crew.’ So, I stayed in the different hotel. The first assistant also had a suite there, as well.
“What happens if you’re staying in the same hotel is the crew and the cast eat you alive. You walk into the foyer and they’re on you like piranha fish. I managed to keep myself concentrating just on what was happening in front of the camera, none of the politics of anything that was going on around it. And I just shot it, literally, from the seat of my pants.”
He, Caine and Klinger (they eventually formed the Three Michaels production company) returned for Pulp, with Caine playing an author of trashy novels hired by a former actor (Mickey Rooney) to ghostwrite his autobiography.
After his unpleasant experience on Omen II — “It soon became obvious that I was shooting a film different from the one [producers] wanted,” he said — he found a way to get along with De Laurentiis on Flash Gordon.
“At about 5 o’clock in the afternoon, I would say to Dino, ‘I’ve got this idea,’ and he would say, ‘Hey, Mike, I’ll think about it,’” he recalled. “The following morning, he would come in and tell me my idea. I’d say, ‘Dino, you’re a genius!’ We had this wonderful working relationship once I’d worked that.”
Hodges’ directing résumé also included music videos for Queen; the 1985 feature Morons From Outer Space; a 1985 episode of the HBO series The Hitchhiker that starred Gary Busey; and several telefilms. He also published a novel, Watching the Wheels Come Off, in 2009.
He was married twice and had two children.
Asked in 2009 why so many of his films dealt with his crime, he replied: “Crime is the litmus that shows what’s really going on below the surface. That’s why I’m attracted to it. Besides, as one myself, sinners interest me more than saints.”
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