Photo by Keith Hamshere - © 2004 Paramount Classics. All Rights Reserved.
Veteran British director Mike Hodges died in Dorset, UK on December 17 at the age of 90. Heart failure was listed as the cause of death.
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In addition to his crime dramas like Get Carter, Pulp, and Croupier, Hodges is perhaps best remembered for his stylized, campy direction of Flash Gordon, which was released in 1980. His last project, shortly before his death, was writing and narrating the biographical documentary All At Sea, in post-production.
In 2000, Andrew Sarris paid tribute to him in an article for the Observer, writing that “Director Mike Hodges has become one of the most under-appreciated and virtually unknown masters of the medium over the last 30 years.” He added that “Mr. Hodges has been hailed by everyone from Martin Scorsese to Pauline Kael as a stylist of the first order.”
Hodges adapted Get Carter from a novel by Ted Lewis and directed the 1971 gangster flick with Michael Caine in the starring role. The film was remade with Sylvester Stallone in 2000. Hodges’s second film, Pulp, starred Caine as a pulp-fiction writer commissioned to ghost-write the memoirs of a gangster. His 1999 movie, Croupier, starred Clive Owens that garnered the biggest receipts of any independent film in the United States that year.
Flash Gordon, which has since attracted a cult following, also garnered much critical acclaim after its release in 1980. The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael described the sci-fi fantasy film as having “some of the knowing, pleasurable giddiness of the fast-moving [James[ Bonds… The director, Mike Hodges, gets right into comic-strip sensibility and pacing.”
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Michael Tommy Hodges was born in Bristol and served on a minesweeper in the British Navy, which opened his eyes to the unpleasant realities of class distinctions in the UK. He began his show-business career as a TelePrompTer operator for the BBC and soon began writing documentaries for ABC, Granada Television, and Thames Television. He also wrote plays that were adapted for BBC Radio.
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His first novel, Watching the Wheels Come Off, was published in 2010.
Hodges is survived by his wife, Carol Laws, his sons Ben and Jake Hodges, and five grandchildren, Marlon, Honey, Orson, Michael and Gabriel.
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