Mike Hodges Still Goes His Own Way

Mike Hodges says he’s not a gambling man--at least not the sort to hang out in casinos--but the veteran director of highly praised films such as “Get Carter” and “Terminal Man” knows a thing or two about the roll of the dice. He gambles every time he makes a movie. And in an up-and-down 30-year career, luck has not always been on his side.

On the strength of his first film, “Get Carter,” he was assured a seat in the pantheon of British cinema. The 1971 film, starring Michael Caine as a ruthless gangster out for revenge, has influenced generations of filmmakers, and last year it ranked 16th in a British Film Institute survey of movie professionals on the 100 top British films.

But, despite this, and the high regard in which filmmakers such as Stanley Kubrick and Martin Scorsese have long held him, Hodges is still, in the words of film critic Andrew Sarris, “one of the most underestimated and virtually unknown masters of the medium.”

No wonder he was drawn, for his latest film, to a screenplay about gambling: He knows all too well how powers beyond anyone’s control hold sway over our fates, despite our best efforts to resist them.

A smart thriller that is getting some of the best reviews of Hodges’ career, “Croupier” opens today. The movie centers on a coolly detached, risk-averse writer who takes a job in a casino to make ends meet. Jack (Clive Owen) likes certainty. He prides himself on never gambling. Croupiers are the casino workers who deal the cards and spin the roulette wheels; they risk nothing. They never lose.

Over the course of the movie, though, Jack gets drawn into a robbery plot by a mysterious gambler (played by Alex Kingston of “ER”) and comes to learn just how little control he has.

“The character of Jack fascinated me,” Hodges, 68, says by phone from his home in Dorsett. “The whole business of someone wanting to control his life--as on some level we all do--yet the idea of the ball landing on the wrong number and suddenly your life is something else. . . . I wanted to take the casino metaphor and extend it out beyond the casino.”

A consummate technician known for his precise control over film form, Hodges makes inventive use of sound to show how chance impinges on Jack’s life outside of the casino. The sound of the ball spinning on the roulette wheel and falling into place recurs again and again during scenes of peril or decision.

With “Croupier,” it would appear that the great comeback Hodges and his fans have been waiting for is in the offing. But, alas, the film got only limited release in England, and it arrives in the United States two years after Hodges finished it.

“I’m happy it is getting a release in the United States at all,” says Hodges.

“Distributors make their own minds up,” he says, sounding genuinely perplexed but philosophical about the way that some of his best films have been hobbled by poor distribution. “Black Rainbow,” a 1990 movie starring Roseanna Arquette and Jason Robards, one of Hodges’ personal favorites, went straight to cable. And the 1974 film “Terminal Man,” acknowledged as one of his masterpieces, didn’t get distributed in England, he says.

When films aren’t even given a chance in the marketplace, he says, it hurts the filmmakers’ chances of getting hired on good projects. “It doesn’t help your case. In this industry you’re only as good as your last film.”

As with all of the films in the Shooting Gallery Film Series, “Croupier” will play for two weeks on selected Loews Cineplex Entertainment screens in 17 cities. Then, based on the per-screen average, the Shooting Gallery and the theater chain will decide whether to extend its run and expand to more screens.

“So far, every film has rolled out,” says Lawrence S. Meistrich, chairman and CEO of Shooting Gallery, who adds that he has high hopes for “Croupier.”

This is the kind of film for which the series was created, the sort of well-crafted art film that possibly has limited commercial appeal but which still can turn a profit if properly handled. If not for the series, “Croupier” might not have been released in the United States.

For a filmmaker who seems at the moment to have fallen out of favor in the industry, Hodges’ influence can still be seen in movies such as “The Long Good Friday,” “The Krays” and “The Limey.” And “Get Carter,” which was remade in 1972 with Bernie Casey and Pam Grier, is being remade again, this time with Sylvester Stallone in the Michael Caine role.

But some of his best films are hardly known except among serious film aficionados who revere his work.

When Terrence Malick saw Hodges’ third film, in 1974, he promptly dashed off a letter.

“I have just come from seeing ‘The Terminal Man’ and want you to know what a magnificent, overwhelming picture it is,” the reclusive filmmaker, who went on to direct “Days of Heaven” and “The Thin Red Line,” enthused. “You achieve moods that I’ve never experienced in the movies before, though it’s only in hope of finding them that I keep going. Your images make me understand what an image is, not a pretty picture but something that should pierce one through like an arrow and speak in a language all its own. . . . You must understand what a rare, extraordinary thing you’ve done.”

In the 26 years since then, Hodges has made only five more movies, not counting his television work. (Perhaps only Malick, among major directors, has been less prolific.) In addition to the little-seen “Black Rainbow” and poorly distributed “Terminal Man,” there is the 1987 movie “A Prayer for the Dying,” which Hodges renounced after the distributor reedited it without his approval. Of “Flash Gordon” (1980) and “Morons From Outer Space” (1985), let us say only that they don’t measure up to marvelous trio of films that launched Hodges’ career (“Pulp,” released in 1972, was the third).

Hodges was hired to co-write and direct “Damien: Omen 2” in 1978 but left the project after several weeks when he and the producer didn’t see eye to eye. “I was extremely grateful when I got off it,” he says.

Dust-ups such as this, he acknowledges, have hurt his career. He’s developed the reputation for being difficult to work with. “I speak my mind,” he says.

While Hodges’ films are sometimes thought of as genre pieces, the best ones are more than that. The gambling metaphor in “Croupier,” for example, works on several levels, not least of which is commentary on what Hodges calls “casino capitalism,” the single-minded pursuit of money without regard to consequences. This was what originally drew him to the script, which was written by Paul Mayersberg, who previously wrote “The Man Who Fell to Earth” and “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence.”

Hodges and Mayersberg worked on it together for another six months, he says. In an unusual move, even though his agent had negotiated sole possessory credit for Hodges, he labeled it a “Mike Hodges-Paul Mayersberg film.”

He did that once before, on a British television production written by Tom Stoppard. In that case, he says, the voice was so distinctly Stoppard’s that it seemed ridiculous to claim otherwise.

“I think the whole idea [of giving the director possessory credit for a movie] should be done away with,” he says.

Since he finished “Croupier” in 1998, Hodges says he has been offered other projects but nothing that he wanted to do. “I’m very picky,” he says.

Some of his best films were written by him as well as directed, and he says he is working on an original script that he hopes will be his next movie. But knowing the role that chance and unforeseen circumstance plays in such matters, he doesn’t make any more definite predictions for it than that.