Mike Hodges: Director of Get Carter and Flash Gordon dies aged 90
Mike Hodges, the British filmmaker behind Get Carter and Flash Gordon, has died.
Hodges died of heart failure at his home in Dorset at the age of 90, his friend Mike Kaplan told NBC News.
Hailed as one of the greatest crime films Britain has ever produced, Get Carter (1971) was Hodges’ first feature film, transformed from novel to cinema release in just eight months.
Starring Michael Caine, it follows a London gangster who returns home to Newcastle to attend his brother’s funeral.
In a 50th anniversary tribute last year, the British Film Institute said it had “a masterful, pacy blend of the sex, violence and style that simultaneously repels and attracts crime film connoisseurs, yet offers much more”.
He was also known for cult classic space opera Flash Gordon (1980), starring Sam J Jones as the comic strip hero.
Sam J Jones and Melody Anderson in Flash Gordon
Hodges was brought in to replace director Nicolas Roeg but had “no idea what I was going to do when I took over”, he told The Guardian in 2020.
“I think that’s part of the success of the film. It’s like a souffle. We managed to put all the right ingredients in, and it sort of rose in some mysterious way.”
Michael Caine films a scene from Get Carter
Born in Bristol on 29 July 1932, Hodges qualified as a chartered accountant before completing two years’ national service in the Navy.
He later wrote that the experience fundamentally reshaped his world view.
“My middle-class eyes were forced to witness horrendous poverty and deprivation that I was previously unaware of,” Hodges wrote in a letter published in The Guardian in May.
“I went into the navy as a newly qualified chartered accountant and complacent young Tory, and came out an angry, radical young man,” he wrote.
Hodges started his career in television as a teleprompter operator and went on to write and direct Pulp (1972), The Terminal Man (1974) and Black Rainbow (1989).
Some of Hodges’ later films include A Prayer for the Dying (1987), Croupier (1998) and I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead (2003).
Donald Trump has said he is considering “taking away” the US citizenship of actress and comedian Rosie O’Donnell, despite a Supreme Court ruling that expressly prohibits a government from doing so.
In a post on Truth Social on Saturday, the US president said: “Because of the fact that Rosie O’Donnell is not in the best interests of our Great Country, I am giving serious consideration to taking away her Citizenship.”
He also labelled O’Donnell, who has moved to Ireland, as a “threat to humanity” and said she should “remain in the wonderful country of Ireland, if they want her”.
O’Donnell responded on Instagram by posting a photograph of Mr Trump with Jeffrey Epstein.
“You are everything that is wrong with America and I’m everything you hate about what’s still right with it,” she wrote in the caption.
“I’m not yours to silence. I never was.”
Rosie O’Donnell moved to Ireland after Donald Trump secured a second term. Pic: AP
O’Donnell moved to Ireland with her 12-year-old son in January after Mr Trump had secured a second term.
She has said she’s in the process of obtaining Irish citizenship based on family lineage and that she would only return to the US “when it is safe for all citizens to have equal rights there in America”.
O’Donnell and the US president have criticised each other publicly for years, in an often-bitter back-and-forth that predates Mr Trump’s move into politics.
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Will Trump address parliament on UK state visit?
This is just the latest threat by the president to revoke the citizenship of someone he has disagreed with, most recently his former ally Elon Musk.
But the two situations are different as while Musk was born in South Africa, O’Donnell was born in the US and has a constitutional right to American citizenship.
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Amanda Frost, a law professor at the University of Virginia School of Law, said the Supreme Court ruled in a 1967 case that the fourteenth amendment of the constitution prevents the government from taking away citizenship.
“The president has no authority to take away the citizenship of a native-born US citizen,” he added.
“In short, we are nation founded on the principle that the people choose the government; the government cannot choose the people.”
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