Clive Owen as Jack Manfred in Mike Hodges’ Croupier (1998)
“It’s all numbers,” the croupier thought. “The spin of the wheel. The turn of the card. The time of your life. Date of your birth. Year of your death. In the ‘Book of Numbers’, the Lord said, ‘Thou shalt count thy steps’.”
Jack Manfred in Croupier (1998)
I FIRST BUMPED into Mike Hodges in January 1998, at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, for the launch of an earlier book of mine, Alex Cox: Film Anarchist. At the time, although I didn’t realize it, he was in the middle of putting together Croupier. A few months after our initial meeting, I saw Croupier at a preview screening in London.
In the warm, dark recess of that movie auditorium in Soho I watched struggling writer Jack Manfred (Clive Owen) take a job as a croupier to make ends meet, and then dispassionately observe the losers at his table. Eighty-seven minutes later, life was a different prospect altogether. Hodges, with a highly intelligent script by Paul Mayersberg, had highlighted my own personal chaos. As the credits rolled, I picked up my diary, my filofax and my mobile phone. But by this point, I could at least hear my own personal wheel spinning.
Croupier, I thought, was a fantastic piece of filmmaking and I knew I had to meet with Mike again. Thanks to an introduction from Alex Cox, we met at a crowded pub in North London, and it was there that he agreed to help with this biography.
Hodges’ career has been marked with enormous critical and varying commercial success. Features as disparate as Get Carter (1971), Flash Gordon (1980), Black Rainbow (1989) and Croupier (1998) are some of the seminal films in their respective genres.
In fact, Hodges’ versatility seems nearly endless. Get Carter (1971), was his debut feature film. A seminal thriller that redefined the gangster genre for British moviemakers, it firmly established him as a master filmmaker. But even after this initial mainstream success, Hodges wasn’t interested in submitting to the kinds of formulas that might ensure great box office. Consider, for instance, his next two films: Pulp (1972), an off-beat satirical comedy, quietly subversive in its approach; and The Terminal Man (1974), a dark and disturbing science-fiction picture, highly effective in driving home a serious warning to society. Admittedly, Hodges was attracted to one mega-budget project, signing up to direct the dazzling, special-effects-filled Flash Gordon (1980) for Dino de Laurentiis, arguably the most successful screen adaptation of a fantasy comic strip, which achieved an international gross of over $100 million.
Squaring the Circle (1984), his innovative television film about an imaginary confrontation between the Solidarity movement, the Church and the Communist party received the International Emmy as the year’s best production. And in Black Rainbow (1989), Hodges riveted audiences with a multi-layered supernatural thriller that gave Rosanna Arquette the best role of her career as a medium who begins predicting the truth.
This book looks at the whole of Hodges’ career, and so also details the disappointments along the way. Despite delivering most of his films exactly how he’d wanted them, Hodges has suffered from the vagaries of distribution, especially in the UK. The Terminal Man (1974), was not distributed here at all and Black Rainbow (1989), although critically acclaimed, was given a token UK release because the distributor was going bust. Of course, what happens to Hodges’ films after they’ve been finished is out of his control.
Major edits were made to A Prayer for the Dying (1987) behind Hodges’ back, forcing him to disown the films and Florida Straits, made a year earlier, was also tampered with.
However, re-editing by producers is common, so perhaps Hodges should count himself lucky it has only happened to him on these two occasions. The film industry is a brutal business and there are certainly far easier ways to earn a living. Thankfully, most of Hodges’ films have survived creatively intact. “I, and my films, might have been lost in the shuffle of film fashion,” he says, “if my number hadn’t come up with Croupier – but it did.” To me, the brilliance of Croupier wasn’t a huge surprise. Before seeing it, I’d obviously already watched and loved Get Carter but was particularly fond of his lesser-known sci-fi thriller The Terminal Man and the little-seen Black Rainbow. What did surprise me was hearing that Croupier had been disowned by those who had commissioned it.
Fortunately, the film became a sleeper success in the US. After it spent over a year gathering dust on the shelves on Channel Four, Croupier was taken on by a New York distribution company called The Shooting Gallery and screened in 17 cities across the States. Critics, starved for intellectual content, acclaimed Hodges as “a master of the medium” (Andrew Sarris, New York Observer). It was named on over 75 US national lists as one of 2000’s Ten Best Films, including: Time Out New York, The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post. New York’s prestigious Museum of Modern Art even held a Hodges Retrospective in January 2001. By this time, Croupier was already booked in at more than 100 screens across America.
Following the picture’s successful run in the US, where it grossed over $8 million at the box office, FilmFour re-released Croupier in the UK. Yet more great reviews followed and suddenly Hodges was hip again.
Two years ago, when FilmFour decided not to distribute Croupier, Hodges seriously contemplated retiring from filmmaking. Why bother when he could happily spend his time to painting, writing and gardening at his home in Dorset? Thankfully, Croupier’s unexpected success has given Hodges a new lease of creative life. First came a documentary about serial-killer films for the Independent Film Channel in America, for which he talked to the likes of David Fincher, Michael Mann, Richard Fleischer and John McNaughton. His play, a surreal comedy about the movie business called Shooting Stars and Other Heavenly Pursuits, opened in London during the summer of 2001 and Hodges will complete 2002 by delivering his new feature, I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead, which reunites him with Croupier star Clive Owen.
Over the years, a few critics have complained that Hodges’ films lack the kind of thematic unity that film scholars treasure so highly. True, he loves new challenges and creating new worlds and, on the surface, none of these pictures seem to resemble any of the others. But look again. His immaculately crafted films reflect the kaleidoscopic nature of modern life, inverting cinematic convention as they unfold. Most of them are rooted in a recognizable contemporary world. A world full of corruption and uncertainty. Commonality also lies in the solid, creative professionalism of their construction and in the passionate direction evident throughout.
Hodges continues to garner respect from movie-goers and critics alike for creating some of the most original movies of the last 30 years. This fully authorized biography provides a comprehensive examination of all of Hodges’ films and television projects. It also unveils his opinions on the British film industry, including the recent spate of Carteresque gangster flicks, and re-tells the fairytale story of how the roulette wheel finally found Mike Hodges’ number …
Steven Paul Davies