According to IMDb, Michael Caine has 142 acting credits to his name, stretching all the way back to 1950.
As soon as we start talking about long careers, there’s a sort of knee-jerk instinct to add the word ‘distinguished’. This is exactly what the press release announcing the actor’s receipt of the Variety Award at this year’s BIFAs has done. ‘With a distinguished career spanning five decades,’ it pronounces, ‘Sir Michael Caine is one of the most celebrated actors to focus the international spotlight on the British film industry.’ Variety’s own Steve Gaydos adds: ‘Michael Caine’s versatility and durability have been hallmarks of his art over decades, making his continuing pursuit of excellence and his passionate and generous commitments to new filmmakers and edgy film projects all the more impressive.’
It would be too easy to go through Michael Caine’s resumé and pick out the tens and tens and tens of duds contained therein (okay, briefly: The Magus, Zee and Co, The Black WIndmill… Nah, there’s too many. Let’s just sum it up by saying Jaws: The Revenge). Any career that has lasted five decades is bound to be marked by peaks and troughs. But it seems fair in Caine’s case to suggest that the latter are far easier to find than the former.
Caine certainly earned his cinematic spurs, labouring for the best part of 15 years in television and minor roles before landing the plum (and plummy) part of Lieutenant Bromhead in Saturday afternoon staple Zulu, a film with quite possibly the best singing scene of all time (if that doesn’t make you proud to be a colonialist, nothing will).
Over the next few years, Caine would do the work that cemented his reputation – and allowed him to coast for longer than some actors’ entire careers before enjoying a late renaissance. As Harry Palmer in 1965’s The Ipcress File, he offered a viable alternative to Bond long before Jason Bourne hit the scene. Though the film’s sequels, including some mid-’90s Canadian dross, are hardly well remembered. But that didn’t matter: by that point, Caine was also Alfie; he was Charlie Croker; he was Jack Carter. He was the face of the swinging ’60s that morphed easily into the savage ’70s.
These are all films to set the hearts of middle-aged men aflutter. It reminds them of when they were full of the same youthful vim and vigour. The same smooth skin and smart patter. But Get Carter was released in 1971. Almost 40 years ago. Since then, although Caine continued to crank out the films at a relentless pace, you were lucky if a good one came more than once every five years or so. And that’s good in the sense of, ‘Yeah, okay, maybe if there’s nothing else on,’ not, ‘Fuck me, that Michael Caine deserves an award for services to the UK film industry.’
The likes of A Bridge Too Far and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels were studded with a once-in-a-decade, Law of Averages hits like Hannah and Her Sisters, the kind of film that had nothing to do with Caine and everything to do with Woody Allen.
Caine lost the better part of 30 years to a lazy kind of mediocrity. This was the self-satisfied autopilot of a man who already had the country pile, the A list friends, the five-star hotels – a full tank of celebrity gas that could be squandered like so much hot air.
Finally, as the new millennium dawned, so too did the realisation that Caine wasn’t a British institution, he was an indictment – a sad, embarrassing reminder that the country had spent too long romanticising its supposedly glorious past and forgetting to get on with the present. And as it clicked, Caine suddenly seemed to start acting, not just working, again. There were roles in excellent, low-key films like Quills and The Quiet American, before he hit paydirt by association with Christopher Nolan’s newly energised Batman franchise.
But even here, let’s not kid ourselves: a new Caine character was developed at the turn of the century but it was then wheeled out for pretty much every film that came his way. The wise, avuncular old man with the twinkle in his eye is Caine’s new stock in trade. He simply traded in one tired old cliché for another.
The powers that be might not agree. But then the powers that be never do, do they? Running an awards ceremony is like being the president of America: anybody with the integrity to do it properly wouldn’t dream of doing it in the first place.
So come December 6 at the BIFAs they’ll all be there in black tie and tight smiles, back slapping and hand shaking and congratulating themselves on the ‘British film industry’. But Michael Caine – sorry, Sir Michael – isn’t the British film industry. At least not one that I’m interested in. Maybe he was once, but it’s not the 1960s anymore, even if the 1960s generation are still in charge. So let them hand out their awards to yesterday’s men. The rest of us are fixed on tomorrow.
