The hardboiled classic, with Michael Caine as an amoral gunman moved to vegeance by his familys suffering, was inspired by true events in Englands Northeast. In 1967, at the height of the one-armed bandit gambling machine craze, a supplier named Angus Sibbet was shot dead in his car in Newcastle. The motive was believed to be his skimming off the top of takings, and involvement by the Kray twins (who had an interest in the business) was suspected. Of the two men charged and convicted of the crime, one of them, Dennis Stafford, was an East London crook and playboy known to the twins. Stafford and his co-accused, Michael Luvaglio, went down on very little evidence and have spent much of their subsequent time trying to get their convictions overturned post-release. The case inspired crime novelist Ted Lewis to write Jacks Return Home, which became the basis of former documentary maker Mike Hodges grittily realistic feature, Get Carter. While the more emotionally-driven storyline centred on Jack Carters investigation of his brothers seemingly accidental death, and violent revenge for his underage nieces coercion into pornography, allusions to the one-armed band murder cropped up in the movie. Gaming Wars reads one newspaper headline; the house chosen as location for the home of one of Jacks sleazy targets was actually that of gaming entrepeneur Vince Landa - Luvaglios brother, who left the country after Sibbets shooting. The campaign to overturn the real-life convictions continues into the present day. But Stafford, now 81, has behaved with classic ambiguity: on release in 1980 he confessed the shooting to the News of the World, swiftly followed by a retraction in the Sunday People, claiming hed only done it for the £10,000 fee. Neither is he averse to conflating himself with the vengeful killer Carter in the film. Do you know, he once told me in a phone conversation on the subject, they even made a black gangster film about me? He was referring to Hitman, the 1972 blaxploitation remake of Get Carter.
Writer/editor/ghost-writer transfixed by crime, cinema and the serrated edges of popular culture. Those similarly afflicted are invited to make contact.
