Category Archives: British crime cinema

This is an addendum to the post earlier in the week on my 10 favourite British gangster films (which you can read here), itself an homage to the 50th anniversary of seminal 1971 crime movie, Get Carter. Amid the responses to this piece was a recommendation I check out a 1970 film, The Reckoning. I’d vaguely heard of The Reckoning but hadn’t seen it and didn’t include it on that list because I didn’t think it was gangster film. And it’s not. But it is a really interesting piece of early seventies British cinema. A proto Get Carter that appeared a year earlier, it is similarly set in northern England and features as its key narrative a man who returns to the working class town of his youth on a mission of revenge.

Michael Marler (Nicol Williamson – best known for his role as Merlin in John Boorman’s 1981 film, Excalibur) is a hard living up and coming middle manager in a London firm that sells accounting machinery. He has fancy clothes, drives a Jaguar car, a beautiful home, and a beautiful trophy wife (Ann Bell), with whom he has a deceptively complex relationship. He is also an utter bastard. A flagrant womaniser, with no loyalty, who despises his managers at the company while at the same time sucking up to them.… Read more