Mike Hodges

Any list of the greatest film noir directors of all time should include Mike Hodges. Hodges passed away a few days at the age of 90. The auteur of the great noirs Get Carter and Croupier was also the director of Flash Gordon, a movie I wrote about just three months ago because it was Elizabeth II's favourite movie. It's often cited as an anomaly in his filmography (though I suppose his subsequent film, Morons from Outer Space, must have continued a thread--I haven't seen it) but, looking over his surprisingly short list of completed films to-day, it does seem to me that Flash Gordon fits in with his other works. The five movies of his I've seen are all about anxiety over losing control.

It's playful in Flash Gordon. The tyrant played by Max von Sydow shows he can give people orgasms at will. It's all tongue-in-cheek, the film is meant to be taken as a kind of BDSM fantasy. The dark mirror of the film is Hodges' final film, 2003's I'll Sleep When I'm Dead. Starring Clive Owen as a killer, systematically pursuing vengeance for his brother's rape and suicide, it's a remarkable film whose plot is instigated by a man's shame at having an orgasm during rape. An old myth among rapists who don't like to see themselves is rapists is that, if the victim has an orgasm, it's not rape--Bill Cosby tried this exact excuse at his trial. Likely he himself believed it. Hodges demonstrates clearly the existential horror, the disharmony between mind and body, that a victim of such an encounter actually suffers.

Hodges' most famous film is his first, 1971's Get Carter in which a gangster, played by Michael Caine, is on a similar path of vengeance to Clive Owen's in the 2003 movie. A gangster is a perfect protagonist for such a story because a gangster desires, and is best at convincing himself he has the power to take, total control. Partly the film is wish-fulfillment candy but it's also a nightmare from beginning to end.

I'd say his best film, though, is 1998's Croupier.

Clive Owen plays a man who is both the operator of a roulette table and a novelist, two jobs in which he endeavours to stay above the fray of life while at the same time exerting control. Unlike I'll Sleep When I'm Dead, Croupier functions better as entertainment because of the fascination inherent in this strange world of gambling and sex Owen's character guides us into. But at the same time, it's also a story about the desire to assert control over one's own life and feelings--the ultimate extension of that being the desire to assert control over other people.

I guess this makes it ironic that the studio took control away from Hodges for his IRA movie, A Prayer for the Dying. That one still manages to be an excellent movie, though.