Lock, Stock and One Smokin' Director

Viewed superficially, The Terminal Man (1973), Hodges' first Hollywood movie, couldn't be more unlike Get Carter, but it continues his preoccupation with the crushing of the innocent by powerful, corrupt forces. It features George Segal as a scientist whose brain is fitted with a computer chip designed to curb his violent psychopathic blackouts. When the process backfires, he goes on a rampage scheduled by the computer. "I wanted to make it in black and white," chuckles Hodges, "but Warners weren't having any of that, so I made a color movie using only the colors black and white." Paranoia escalates through Hodges' use of large areas of blankness in the frame and ambient silence on the soundtrack, huge empty zones into which the audience pours its anxieties.

"British cinema," François Truffaut once famously asked Alfred Hitchcock, "isn't that a contradiction in terms?" Well, perhaps (much like French rock & roll), but only if you confine your view of it to overrated logistics managers like David Lean or the upmarket bodice-rippers of the Merchant-Ivory school of literary adaptation. Behind them, however, there is a whole invisible school, a missing generation almost, of politically and formally radical filmmakers, that is now finally, slowly getting its artistic due. Some, like Bill Douglas and Alan Clarke, are already dead; others, like Peter Watkins, live in embittered exile, furious at the financial, political and imaginative constraints that stunted their careers. Others, like Terence Davies and Chris Petit -- and like Mike Hodges, whose themes and aesthetics place him squarely in this company -- can wait years between films. Typically, and disgracefully, Croupier currently has no distributor.

Is Hodges at all bitter that he's only been able to make eight films in 35 years? "I do wish that I'd had a long-term relationship with a single producer," he says, "because I'm not much of a hustler, but given the way things could have turned out, I'm always astonished that my messages in bottles, as I think of my films, ever got off the ground at all. Astonished, but very happy, too."

SHOOT TO KILL: The Cool Crimes of Mike Hodges The American Cinematheque at the Egyptian Theater | 6712 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood March 26­31 | (323) 466-3456, Ext. 2