As Michael Caine turns 90, Tom Jolliffe looks at a few of the iconic actor’s more bizarre B-movie choices…
It’s fair to say that Michael Caine has had a productive career in his 90 years. He’s been going since the late 50’s, he was a breakout megastar in Britain in the 60’s, and has had several renaissances in his time, not least becoming a regular fixture in Christopher Nolan’s films. It’s also fair to say, that when an actor has made as many films as Sir Maurice, that he’s had his share of duds, including the ignominy of appearing in Steven Seagal’s ego eco pic On Deadly Ground.
In the 60s, Caine was an uber cool star of British cinema. He’d had a string of hits, and was well known for a wry grinned, easy going charisma and boyish charm. By the 70s he was just creeping up to middle age. Some of those boyish roles were being replaced with grittier work, none more so than Get Carter. Likewise his appeal was becoming more prominent in Hollywood with Sleuth and The Man Who Would be King allowing him to flex his acting muscles opposite Laurence Olivier and Sean Connery. He had a couple of iconic war films to add into his CV as well, with The Eagle Has Landed and A Bridge Too Far.
Then Caine did something strange. He chose to make a film about killer bees. Now this didn’t seem to be one of those B pictures that comes about when you’re on a career slump. Caine seemed to be on the up. He was on a largely successful run. The Swarm, which does exactly what it says on the tin, sees Caine battling African killer bees that are spreading over American cities. It’s a brilliant film. By brilliant, I mean it’s terrible but it’s also Michael Caine…in a film about a swarm of killer bees. It’s bizarre. I remember stumbling upon this film quite by chance on TV one day. It seemed goofy, a kind of Bee-centric riff on The Birds, and then Caine popped up…much to my surprise.
Quite why they made the film and why Caine choose to star in it, I couldn’t say but the film came out in 78. By this point American cinema was changing. A leaning towards creatively driven, dramatic and gritty, groundbreaking realist cinema would give way to a swarm of impending blockbusters. Star Wars and Jaws kicked it off. After that, everyone wanted to riff Star Wars and Jaws and riff they did. Bees aren’t quite as immediately dramatic as a shark of cause, and the film went by largely unnoticed. Still, for a time, Caine’s options I suspect were becoming a little more light in dramatic impact, particularly as far as his Hollywood work.
In 1980 and 1981, he had a run of three B-movies. On the one hand he had Brian De Palma’s enjoyably pulpy whoddunit throwback Dressed to Kill. Not subtle, and a kind of Hitchcock-lite B picture. He also did The Island, which saw Caine trying to uncover the disappearance of boats in the Bermuda Triangle and running afoul of pirates. The third? That was The Hand.
Now on the surface this would be the sort of ridiculous B movie of the 50’s you might have seen double featuring with an A movie, or maybe a video era trashtacular, but The Hand, whilst not brilliant, is written and directed by Oliver Stone. You’d probably guess that had something to do with Caine’s decision to do a film where a comic book artist loses his hand in a car accident, only for the severed hand to disappear and then come back (of its own accord) to cause terror later on. It’s great fun actually, and probably better than it has a right to be (that being said, not nearly as good as the hand skit in Evil Dead 2). Caine chews scenery like no tomorrow in it.
Caine then had another good run. He went back to Britain to make Educating Rita and Mona Lisa. He also had a great deal of success with Hannah and Her Sisters with Woody Allen. There were a few less successful films in that period, but Caine had an Oscar nomination for Educating Rita and a win for Hannah and Her Sisters to his name so one film choice made in 1987 seemed odd: Jaws: The Revenge.
Now, at this juncture the shark thing had been well trodden. Spielberg’s original did as much as you can effectively do in a film about a killer shark. It’s a great film. So after two inferior sequels, they seemingly weren’t done. The fourth film even goes so far as to push the notion that the shark in question is actually on a kind of Get Carter-style revenge mission. The film is ridiculous, even outdoing Jaws 3-D for she ludicrousness but what this has in its locker, is Michael Caine. Why is an actor of such esteem in this? The brief case of cash must have been big, but regardless, Caine is here and worse still, his character is called Hoagie… Hoagie!!
Caine has starred in a few more questionable genre films since then, including Journey 2 and The Last Witch Hunter, but then again, whatever he stars in he instantly improves and seeing Caine, whether driving a Mini through Turin, or butlering for Batman, or even trying to stop a swarm of bees, is always a joy.
Tom Jolliffe is an award winning screenwriter and passionate cinephile. He has a number of films out around the world, including When Darkness Falls and several releases due out soon, including big-screen releases for Renegades (Lee Majors, Danny Trejo, Michael Pare, Tiny Lister, Nick Moran, Patsy Kensit, Ian Ogilvy and Billy Murray) and War of The Worlds: The Attack (Vincent Regan). Find more info at the best personal site you’ll ever see.
