Jack's Return Home

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Various parties warn him to head back to London but his determination to find the killer leads to violence, bloodshed and the eventual truth.

Despite this, the release was given a five-star review in Empire, where it was described as "one of the best British films of the 70s". Since I wrote the recent celebratory piece of the film for Ed Copeland on Film’s blog, I repurposed it for this parallel post entry. On its general release in the North of England, Chibnall notes it had a "very strong first week", before an unseasonal heatwave damaged cinema attendance.Back in town, Jack is threatened by henchmen who want him to leave town, but he fights them off, capturing and interrogating one to find out who wants him gone. LARB publishes daily without a paywall as part of our mission to make rigorous, incisive, and engaging writing on every aspect of literature, culture, and the arts freely accessible to the public. If anything, the film is even more hard-boiled and bleak than the book, as Hodges infused it with his experience as a conscript in the Royal Navy in the late 1950s. And he accomplished it using the location of the windswept, industrial, and dismal setting of Newcastle of the time.

All pointed down towards the Tyne and overlooked the imposing Dunston Power Station, which was situated on the other side of the river. Giving his reasons for wanting to be involved with the film, the actor said "One of the reasons I wanted to make that picture was my background. A censored version was released in West Germany on 6 August 1971, with a running time nine minutes shorter than the original.Even so, he created an iconic character in the annals of British crime fiction, one who’s been copied many times since but has rarely been equalled, and set him in a world long lost but utterly unforgettable (even if mostly for the wrong reasons). As he speculates at the beginning of the book: “They hadn’t even bothered to be careful; they hadn’t even bothered to be clever.

Over time, the film has accumulated more than its share of enthusiasts on either side of the Atlantic (crime film aficionados can spot its influence on both Quentin Tarantino and Guy Ritchie’s work). Hodges had also previously worked on current affairs programme World in Action, the arts programme Tempo and a 1968 children's television serial, The Tyrant King, and all these past experiences informed his approach to his film debut. She attracted Hodges' attention not just for her good looks but for her work on Alun Owen's television plays Stella and Doreen.American critics were generally more enthusiastic, but the film languished on the drive-in circuit, while MGM focused its resources on producing Hit Man, a blaxploitation-themed remake of the film.