A young Mike Hodges, during his years in the Navy
“You have to make a choice in life. Be a gambler or a croupier. Then live with your decision come what may.”
Jack Manfred in Croupier
Mike Hodges was born on 29 July 1932, in Bristol where his father worked as a commercial sales representative for a tobacco company. While Hodges’ father was Church of England, his mother was a Roman Catholic and, as in all such “mixed marriages” of the 1930s and 1940s, the Catholic parent of the family made sure the child was also educated as a Catholic. Hodges’ mother, however, didn’t like the local convent and so in 1939, a 7-year-old Hodges was sent from Bristol to Prior Park College, a boarding school in Bath run by the Irish Christian Brothers.
The influential Irish Roman Catholic religious Order, involved in teaching generations of youngsters around the world, was later disbanded for harbouring pederasts. They even issued an unprecedented high-profile public apology for sexual and other abuse inflicted over years in its institutions. Recently, the congregation of the Christian Brothers in Ireland took out half-page advertisements in Irish newspapers admitting that some victims’ complaints had been ignored. The admission followed a number of prosecutions initiated against members of the Order, over sex and other crimes, often dating back decades.
Inquiries into abuse by Roman Catholic clerics of school and orphanage pupils developed into a huge probe of allegations dating back to the 1930s and involving hundreds of people over decades. Over 50 former and serving members of the brutalized and supposedly celibate Order are being investigated for complaints against them of sexual and physical abuse of the young persons in their care, and the enquiry into the running of schools by the Christian Brothers has mushroomed into a general investigation of abuse involving children in state-funded, religious-run schools and orphanages.
Hodges describes his own time spent at the Irish Christian Brothers-run college as “grim”. There until he was 15, he simply learned to survive:
“They used the strap and the cane and for serious offences the punishment was a ritualized affair, like an execution. We used to sleep in small cubicles and the punishment was enacted straight after lights out. The victim was taken from his cubicle to the communal washroom which was at centre of the dormitory, bent over a stool and thrashed. Everyone else could hear the swish of the cane and the screams and grunts of the child. In retrospect it probably seems more callous than it was. At the time you just accepted it. We were boarders and there was literally no one you could turn to.
“During my time at the junior school, St Peter’s, there was a house master who would come to the cubicles after dark and touch us sexually. It wasn’t buggery, not even masturbation. He just seemed to want to touch young flesh. He was a very sad character. However, during the summer holidays my mother overheard me talking with a school friend about how I’d pretend to be asleep when he came to the cubicle, as it seemed to put him off. Our mothers, being good Catholics, were shocked. They went to the headmaster, but of course the house master denied it all. Amazingly, we were then sent back. Can you imagine that happening now? People were so innocent then. It was during the war and they believed everything they were told. I was only 10 or 11 but I already knew differently.
“That house master never spoke to me again, which was a relief. Until then he must have liked me. He even made me librarian. I wasn’t a voracious reader but I did love books and words and I remember coming across the word ‘rape’ and asking him what it meant. He immediately dodged the question and said it was something you used in the garden!
“School was a painful period of my life, a period of survival. But of course it was during the war and so the whole country was trying to survive.”
One significant part of Hodges’ school life was the fortnightly film screening, every other Sunday night. This was his introduction to cinema with the musical comedy Top Hat (1935), starring Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, being the first film Hodges ever saw. The films were carefully chosen, including Spencer Tracy fighting the Indians in Northwest Passage (1939), as well as other war movies and historical adventures.
On leaving school at 15, Hodges returned to the family home in Salisbury, Wiltshire, and soon realized he wanted to work in the cinema, a result of his teenage years spent in the local movie houses in the “dark rooms of escape”. There were three cinemas in the town – the Odeon, the Regal and the ABC – and because his parents didn’t really approve of him using all of his spare time watching movies, Hodges found himself having to lie a lot in order to visit all three venues, not to mention the Sunday films.
Hodges soon became a big fan of Billy Wilder as well as the work of the writer-director team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, in addition to B-movie classics such as 1955’s Kiss Me Deadly. He was particularly intrigued by Wilder’s scathing view of early Hollywood in Sunset Boulevard (1950) and entranced by Powell and Pressburger’s Technicolor films, from the panoramic and witty The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) to the striking and strange Gone to Earth (1950). As a teenager Hodges was also captivated by Joseph Mankiewicz’s jaundiced look at the showbiz battle zone of Broadway in All About Eve (1950).
Another director Hodges found fascinating was the Cypriot filmmaker Michael Cacoyannis:
“Cacoyannis was the first foreign director I fell in love with. I didn’t know it at the time but he had a British cinematographer called Walter Lassally. A Girl in Black (1956) is an astonishing film. I’ll never forget it. I went to see it at the Odeon in Salisbury. Because it was a foreign film, it ended up as the B-movie in a double bill. I have no idea how it ended up in Salisbury; nor did the audience, most of them were talking all through it. I remember standing up in the cinema and telling them to shut up. What a prig! I simply couldn’t understand why these arseholes were talking through such an amazing film, one which was far better than any A-film I’d seen for years. There is an extraordinary scene in which the heroine, a widow, leaves the village to meet a young man. They are seen having sex, and by the time she returns the word is out. The torture of her walk back; everyone turns their back on her. She is disgraced, and alone, as good as dead. It is still, to this day, for me one of the most awful and horrifying scenes I’ve ever watched. How an audience could not react to that just seemed impossible and I got very angry.”
It’s not surprising that Hodges retreated to the cinema a lot, mainly to escape the mundane world of life as a trainee accountant. He had wanted to apply for the stage course at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (RADA) but his parents wouldn’t hear of it. His father wanted him to have a profession. He was good at maths and it was decided he’d be a chartered accountant. A deal was struck and he passed his exams to become an accountant on the understanding he could do what he wanted afterwards.
Hodges working on the 1964 World in Action documentary on Freemasons (banned by the broadcaster before transmission)
Hodges qualified in 1955, but, while waiting to do his National Service, preferred working as a postman, farm labourer and bed salesman to a career in accountancy. At the age of 22 he was conscripted into the Royal Navy. From 1955 to 1957 he served in the Fishery Protection Squadron. As a Chartered Accountant he could have had an automatic commission but chose to serve, on the lower deck, on board HMS Coquette and later HMS Wave. He sailed to Iceland during the time of the cod wars, Norway, Sweden and Holland, as well as docking in almost every fishing port around Britain. The experience gave him a whole new slant on life:
“It was probably the best thing that ever happened to me up until then and perhaps the best decision of my life. Being on the lower deck of a small ship, working on minesweepers, changed me for ever. It was my university. From a lower middle-class background I entered this world which I didn’t know existed. I went in as a child of true blue parents, a private school, a profession, and a Young Conservative – came out a rabid Socialist. My politics were radically changed when I saw the places where people lived and the social deprivation of Hull, Grimsby, Lowestoft, all the ports. The conditions in which people lived was horrifying. Hogarthian. Seeing the underbelly of my country would later very much influence my approach to Get Carter.”
After his Navy stint was over Hodges went to London. There he managed to get a job as an operator with Teleprompters Limited. “Great big yellow rolls like toilet paper, with the script typed in oversized letters, for TV presenters and performers to read from. It was all live in those days,” he recalls. The company was owned by the renowned film producer, Harry Allan Towers. The job only paid £10 a week but got Hodges his opening in the television and film industry. Although “the cameramen hated you because the prompters added extra weight to their cameras”, Hodges was in a position to observe what was happening in the studios at the BBC, the different ITV companies and even in the film studios. “Studios can be daunting places when you first go into them. Now I was able to observe all of the intricacies of film and television production and on my own terms. I was able to watch directors at work and quickly realized that a lot of them were complete chumps. I knew I could do better!”
On one trip up to Manchester for a production at ABC, Hodges found himself sitting on a train with Sidney Newman, the executive producer of ABC Television’s Armchair Theatre. Overhearing Newman saying that he was looking for a drama based around the issue of euthanasia, Hodges quickly completed a play entitled Some Will Cry Murder and sent it in to the programme’s production office. It never made it to the screen but led to other offers.
“I was privy to all the fallout in society … but like a lot of young people I was still idealistic . . . I still dreamt we were going to change the world.”
Mike Hodges
Euston Films’ Lloyd Shirley, then head of advertising magazines for ABC, asked Hodges to write for him. This meant a sudden leap from £10 a week to £25 a script so he abandoned his job as a teleprompter operator. Aside from advertising magazines, he wrote for Once Upon a Time, a children’s series which starred such personalities as Spike Milligan and Ron Moody; Catching a Woman’s Eye, a documentary about designing and marketing women’s products; and Rave, a light-entertainment feature starring Tony Tanner.
When Shirley became ABC’s head of features, he made Hodges editor of Sunday Break, a religious programme for young people. It was policy to hire an atheist as editor to maintain a quizzical stance. That suited Hodges fine. A year later, after making an impression with an hilarious one-off documentary about funeral directors entitled The British Way Of Death, he landed his “dream job” as a producer/director on ITV’s documentary series World in Action. “In its early day it was such a great programme,” recalls Hodges. “The audience never knew the subject matter until it actually aired. It banked on their curiosity, and it worked. It’s a lesson I took to. The style was a tabloid approach, but tabloids were different then, and the programmes were extraordinarily lively. By comparison the BBC’s current affairs flagship, Panorama, was very plonky. These few years gave me time to accumulate knowledge of shooting, choosing lenses and watching more experienced directors at work.”
However, it was also during his time spent on World in Action that Hodges honed his quizzical worldview. Jet-setting between global flash points and war zones, his encounters with young soldiers in Vietnam, far-right presidential candidates in Dallas and battered union organizers in Detroit fuelled his “total disillusionment with America” as the summer of love disintegrated. “The US administration and its citizens seemed divorced from each other. In a sense that has happened, only we didn’t realize our dreams were to be harnessed to money, profit was to replace trust.”
After two years on World in Action, Hodges moved from current affairs into the arts, taking the executive producer role, as well as that of director, on ITV’s Tempo. The programme had been started under Ken Tynan’s editorship, having a primetime slot and big budget. But the budget had shrunk to £2,000 per programme and the transmission time was now 2:15 on a Sunday afternoon. Even so Hodges was happy with the change in direction, having tired of current affairs: “I’d had a belly full. In current affairs you leap from one subject to another, from one interviewee to another, you can begin to feel like a leech, sucking what you want from people.”
Hodges was neither frightened nor respectful of televised “culture”, if anything he objected to these unnatural barriers. Refusing to cover the current fads, with Tempo, he tried a journalistic approach, always with a critical edge. Hodges was responsible for films on Harold Pinter, Orson Welles, Jaques Tati, Jean-Luc Godard, Lee Strasberg, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Charles Eames. Hodges came to believe there shouldn’t be any arts series on television – or religious ones: “They form a kind of ghetto. And there’s a desperation finding material to fill them. Indeed, towards the end of Tempo we tried to blow them away completely. Just look at The South Bank Show. It’s dead on its feet. If not dead, tired. I can’t watch it any more. The programmes feel cheap and desperate now.”
Orson Welles talks to Mike Hodges for the arts series Tempo
During his two years at the helm of Tempo, Hodges gathered around him a highly talented team of directors – Dick Fontaine, James Goddard and Denis Postle. So, at the end of 1966, they came up with New Tempo, a series of nine films all with generic titles: “We wanted to give the films a sense of freedom so that the film itself would be the art form. While the content was of prime importance we sought different ways of presenting it.” The nine films produced were The Information Explosion, Disposability, Heroes, Noise, Nostalgia, Stimulants, Leisure, Violence and a final reprise which took elements from the previous eight. All were very experimental. The opener caused viewers to jam the switchboards at ABC with complaints. “There was so much time-lapse photography it gave people indigestion. Too close to Sunday lunch was my excuse,” recalls Hodges. “More than 200 people phoned in because they either thought it was awful or too unsettling. Only one person thought it was fantastic.” Hodges had wanted New Tempo to be the end of the arts programme for ever but, instead, the series created an industry buzz. New Society ran a feature on it and the advertising agencies became great advocates, always helpful in commercial television. Having made such an impact, the programmes were repeated just six months later, unprecedented for ITV at the time. “Unfortunately it didn’t change anything. It’s fascinating how back then we really thought we could change things. How naïve we were. Nothing changes. Maybe history is cyclical – not progressive.”
The following year, Hodges produced and directed the six-part children’s serial The Tyrant King (1967) as a way of convincing ABC to switch drama on to film. “By now I was addicted to 16mm as a pliable, fast-moving medium in which to work. More importantly I wanted to convince them that they had better sales outlets compared with video. I realized that the economics of the venture was the key. With The Tyrant King, I proved that you could do good stuff on film for a reasonable price.”
After proving his point, Hodges was commissioned to write two film scripts. He was also hired to produce and direct the 90-minute slots for Thames Television’s Playhouse series. The first of these location-shot thrillers was Suspect (1968). This Chabrolesque murder story is a very slow-moving, low-key psychological thriller, set in a rural English village, which draws together the parallel stories of a police search for a murdered child and the breakdown of a middle-class couple’s marriage – a subtle comparison between murder physical and murder psychological. A highly personal film, the script for Suspect is partly based on Hodges’ own marriage, his parents’ marriage and even features his late wife Jean (whom he’d married in 1963) and two young children, Ben and Jake. Hodges’ earlier experience in documentaries is in evidence as he slowly charts the bleak police investigation into the 11-year-old girl’s disappearance. Pieced out in odd little fragments, Suspect eventually builds into an unsettling, matter-of-fact portrait of a sexual predator on the loose in the English countryside. The film stars Rachel Kempson, Bryan Marshall and George Sewell.
The second film was the fast-moving Rumour (1969) which dealt with a journalist’s foray into the underworld. (These two films were to be the prototype for the formation of Thames subsidiary Euston Films, which five years later was to launch The Sweeney). A much more hard-edged piece in comparison with Suspect, it is the story of a cynical tabloid newspaper gossip columnist who unwittingly becomes a pawn in a particularly nasty political conspiracy. Hodges’ film looks at the freedom of the press and what happens when it abuses that freedom. Michael Coles stars as the muckraking Fleet Street hack who gets drawn into the murder of a young hooker with supposed political connections. In the end, the scandal he’s investigated invokes dark forces that destroy him, and the story’s brilliant final twist is reminiscent of Nicolas Roeg’s Performance. Filmed entirely on location in London, Hodges uses long lenses throughout, resulting in a sense of watching from a distance. This voyeuristic style would later become a trademark and continued with Get Carter (1971).
Hodges celebrates his 39th birthday during the making of Get Carter (1971)
Another of Hodges’ trademarks is his attention to detail and love for giving clues and warnings to what is about to happen to his characters. In Rumour, Coles, as the hero of the piece, is first seen driving a flashy pink Oldsmobile along the Westway in London. At the time, a cinema stood behind the flyover, its marquee peeping above the parapet. Goodbye Columbus was playing there. By carefully excluding the word Columbus from the shot, the hero is introduced with the word Goodbye in large letters behind him. In the end, he is killed by a hit man.
Hodges says the experimental style he adopted for Rumour was the result of his love for the films of Jean-Luc Godard:
“I love the sense of freedom which Godard brought to his films. He would digress or simply decide to just repeat a shot. It was totally intuitive. In truth, Rumour should be dedicated to him as there’s no doubt that I felt that same sense of freedom. For example, during the shooting I was travelling back and forth through the Blackwall tunnel and I felt that as it was so strange and eerie I wanted to somehow use it in the film but I didn’t know how. Anyway I had my cameraman attach the camera to the roof of my little Fiat and drove through the tunnel two or three times. When I then came to edit the film I realized the importance of my intuition. The shots gave me the start and end of my film as a descent into hell. I even quoted one of my favourite T S Elliot quotes: ‘I think we are in rat’s alley’. A script is only on paper yet for some it’s like concrete. It should be a living, changing entity and if it isn’t there is something deeply wrong with what you’re doing.”
An ambitious mix of 1940s’ noir and late 1960s’ psychedelia, Rumour incorporates a disturbing exploration of the themes of corruption, manipulation and the abuse of power, which Hodges would later expand in Get Carter (1971). It also paints a vivid picture of the London underworld he would revisit decades later in Croupier (1998) and I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead (2002). Rumour also marks Hodges’ first use of voice-over narration. These important themes and stylistic devices are prevalent in much of Hodges’ subsequent work.
Despite causing a minor outcry from hacks in Fleet Street, Rumour was a big success and got nominated for the 1969 Prix D’Italia, the international award for the best dramatic show of the year. It also brought Hodges to the attention of the film producer, Michael Klinger, and led to the invitation to write and direct Get Carter…
