The Garden Cinema; Get Carter

 Garden Cinema; Get Carter

 

 

There’s a new independent cinema in Covent Garden. It’s the Garden Cinema, Parker Street. In its neighbourhood, there’re not many actual gardens about; more theatres, bars and boutiques, and some offices (which are what the Cinema previously housed).

 

The Cinema, on my visit, immediately called to mind an episode in the film In Bruges. It’s the exchange between the weary hitman Ken and the creepy gunsmith Yuri. I omit much. Yuri: “there are a lot of alcoves [for an assassination] …you use this word, alcoves?”. Ken:“alcoves, yes, it’s kind of like nooks and crannies..”. Yuri:”Nooks and crannies, yes! Perhaps this would be more accurate!”..

 

For at the heart of the Cinema, or more accurately in its basement, is a bar area off which there are many alcoves , or perhaps nooks and crannies (some but not all a little suggestive of nooky..). all are decorated with murals on classic cinema themes.

 

Outside the alcoves the prevailing central colour is dark reddish, giving an Edward Hopper sheen to the immediate bar space, especially in the somewhat dead hours of the mid-afternoon.

 

This idiosyncratic, but heartfelt and studied design is a welcome contrast to the corporate blueprints imposed on other cinemas, even those actually or notionally “independent”, in some very loose sense of that word (Picturehouses? Everymans?).

 

The programming is unconstrained by immediate commercial pressures and follows artistic principles (which may hopefully bring its own reward). It includes seasons of classic films, which may be defined by country, epoch, or genre. But some chosen new releases are also shown.

 

Among the latter, recently, was the 50^th anniversary re-release, in a new print, of the grim crime classic Get Carter, starring Michael Caine (and a very sinister John Osborne, Looking Sideways in Concealed Anger). This is what I had come to see, after due extrication from the nooks and crannies.

 

I’m not going to explicate the plot, or venture views on the riveting cinematography (was ever a Northeastern cityscape rendered so vividly and depressingly, both socially and visually?).

 

But it was interesting that this bleak and amoral adventure was being shown at the same time as the Cinema’s Film Noir season – of classic films such as the Maltese Falcon andFarewell My Lovely. 

 

In those films, there’s usually someone (most likely the weary gumshoe anti-hero) who, under a thick patina of cynicism, shows some kernel of moral decency, in some form that a non-psychopathic audience can relate to.

 

Get Carter offers no such sentimentality. Although our anti-hero is on a mission to avenge terrible wrongs done to his brother and niece, his revenge is that of an extremely Nasty Piece of Work – murderous, without compunction, never rising above gangster savagery, and, let it be said, gangster carnality.

 

Some of Clint Eastwood’s revenge movies come near to this template. But those we see through the prism of stylised tropes belonging to the gunslinger Western (not least Eastwood’s spaghetti ones). They put the brutality of the stories at a remove because, after all, we are watching a set of visual and plot cliches.

 

Get Carter has no such perspective. We are given a relentless parade of the unpleasant, the desperate, the pathetic, the casualties. 

 

You wouldn’t want to come out of the cinema fantasizing about being deadly like Caine’s character. If you do, you are to be well avoided.

 

June 2022