Wilde in Paris (1980)

D. Pierre de Franc
Colour

Michael Caine recently stated that he chose his movies on two criteria: whether it was going to make him a lot of money, or whether it was likely to win him an Oscar. So who the fuck knows what the explanation is for him appearing in the 1979 drugged up, fantasy thriller? As no sane observer would ever look at this and think it had Oscar glory etched right through it. So maybe French cinema in the early 1980s was bizarrely well remunerated, or perhaps it just suited Caine for tax purposes to hang out in Paris for a few months. Then again maybe he just read the script and thought it’d be a great wheeze to play Oscar Wilde.

Yes, here is Michael Caine as Oscar Wilde. An Oscar Wilde after the disgrace, who is now living in Paris and drinking too much and doing too many drugs, but his mind is still sharp and he has a murder mystery to solve.

For you see, as well as being a playwright, poet, novelist, raconteur and the world acknowledged wittiest man alive, Oscar Wilde was apparently also the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes. So, get your bon mots and deer stalker ready, as this is Oscar Wilde, dipso great detective.

To be fair Caine does acquit himself admirably as Wilde. Wilde was a big man and so Caine immediately looks the part, but adds a certain prissy delicacy of tone. His voice manages to stay neutral accent-wise and that’s great as it would have been a cockney calamity if some Smithfield Market had slipped in. Christopher Plummer has the thankless Watson role as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, assisting Wilde in his investigation, but being Christopher Plummer does a genius job with it; and Liza Minnelli does a good Liza Minnelli as the Moulin Rouge dancer who loves Wilde too tragically.

So the performances are good and the idea is certainly no worse than any other, so it’s frustrating how bad a film this is. Having a hero who is self-medicating is one thing, using it as an excuse to OD on addled weirdness is quite another. Animated angels appear to Welles and give him important clues before then seeming to perform fellatio on him off camera; our heroes hire a horse and cart, where the horse is driving and the man – naked with bridle jammed into his mouth – is pulling; while in a fake reveal the killer is revealed to be Wilde himself, which does let Michael Caine face off against Michael Caine – both of them absolutely astonished. Most surreally though, at the Moulin Rouge we get – for no apparent reason – to watch frock-coat wearing Bee-Gees performing a slowed down ‘Islands in the Stream’, while Pans People writhe in front of them. All of that makes it sound more fun than it actually is, as this an ill focused and frustrating film - to the point where having watched it I even now have no idea who the killer is.

So the question remains and it's probably a mystery the great Oscar Wilde himself couldn't solve, why did Sir Michael Caine make this movie?

Runaway! (1970)

D. Michael Winner
Colour (but a really washed out colour, as if it woke up hung-over that morning)


Reading Robert Galbrath/J.K. Rowling's tale of a down on his luck private eye in Soho, reminded me with sudden incredible clarity (like I’d just eaten a madeleine) of this neglected Michael Caine private eye movie. And that memory gave me particular satisfaction when I realised that Caine's character is actually named - and I'm not making this up - Barry Potter. Not that I’m suggesting for one second that Rowling based either of her recurring characters on this film. Having read ‘The Cuckoo’s Calling’, Michael Caine certainly isn’t Comoran Strike. Admittedly I’ve only seen the Harry Potter films rather than read the books, but unless there’s something in the novels about the teen wizard having a porn collection and liking rough sex, he’s not a student of Hogwarts either.


This is a tale about a down on his luck London private eye, but Comoran Strike has nothing on Barry Potter for rough living. Yes, both sleep in their offices and squander their money on booze and fags, but Strike doesn't steal a tenner from the elderly lady upstairs for electric metre money. Nor does he effectively mug a homeless man when said homeless man is cheeky. Nor, indeed, does he steal a chip from a nun in a chip-shop before suggesting flirtatiously that he remove her from the habit. There is an aggressive unpleasantness and seediness to this character - the anti-anti-anti-Philip Marlowe. It's almost as if the filmmakers looked at Caine as Harry Palmer and decided that he was still just too upwardly mobile for their tastes, it was time to bring him down several dirty and greasy pegs. And Caine relishes the part, clearly on paper this is an unpleasant man, but our favourite cockney knight uses all his charm to make sure he still deserves to be the hero.


Philip Marlowe is undoubtedly a (much more noble) background presence, as the plot isn’t far off Raymond Chandler's ‘The Little Sister’ (which had been filmed far more glamorously in Hollywood a few years earlier). A prim librarian type seeks out Potter's help to find her missing sibling, who’s disappeared into the Soho netherworld of strip clubs and pornographers. Before long Potter finds himself up to his neck in sleaze (not necessarily a problem, Potter admits to liking “a bit of naughty”), and murder (more of a problem, particularly when he finds himself the prime suspect). It's up to Potter to stay one step ahead of the police as he tries to solve the crime.


The audience stayed away en mass, which is why the British tough guy Michael Caine picture people remember from the early 1970s is ‘Get Carter’ and that’s fair enough as it’s much stronger and looks far better. However good performances abound: from Ray Milland as a disgraced former copper with an accent so very, very Welsh (so much so I couldn’t work out whether he was putting it on or that was indeed his real accent), surprise guest-star Frankie Avalon, hamming it up as a would be gangster even when he looks a little lost in seedy London, and most astonishing of all Cilla Black – of all people – as a hard as nails prostitute. If those punters who stood excited at her side in the ‘Blind Date’ and ‘Surprise, Surprise’ years had watched this, they’d probably have come armed. 


(Casting Director-wise, the movie credits one Phyllis Dunfield, who clearly had a very left-field mind that’s hard not to admire.)


The Rowling/Galbrath book is better, as despite a not bad cast and a suitably muddy storyline, this is a film which – even with Sir Michael’s efforts – is so seedy and depressive it leaves you wanting to have a good scrub down afterwards.

The Caribou Caper (1978)

D. Clive Donner
Colour


Peter Sellers, that gifted and subtle character actor of the 1950s, had truly morphed into a monster of a performer by the latter half of the 1970s. One who was quite happy to crash through all his scenes with as broad a characterisation as possible and carrying a side of ham on a platter the whole way. This was the period where he had just returned to prominence thanks to 'The Pink Panther' movies, never the most understated (or by this point reliably funny) of films and Sellers now seemed to regard any movie he was in as an extension of Inspector Clouseau. Everything he did had to be as loud and brash and hi-hi-hi-larious as possible, except when Sellers is on the screen generally only the first two apply.


And that’s a shame as this is a film that really cries out for a subtler Peter Sellers, perhaps not the everyman performer of the 1950s, but the 1960s model who could glide through the original 'Pink Panther' without deliberately pushing over every apple cart he could find.


Peter Sellers and Michael Caine are brothers, I know it’s difficult to believe when you look at them, but then elsewhere in cinema history Sean Connery played Dustin Hoffman’s dad and a woman named Katy Elder managed to birth two sons with a 36 year age difference. Sometimes you just have to go with these things. They’re not just any brothers mind you, but high-end criminal brothers who have carried out a series of daring jewel thefts across Europe. Now they want one more job, Caine so he can have security on the yacht he plans to sail around the world, and Sellers because it will help him fulfil his life-long dream of buying Napoleon’s underpants. And to do this they target wealthy American movie star, Caribou Curvaluv, (played with her usual levels of bored adequacy by Raquel Welch), but what happens when they each fall in love with her?


First things first, this is a film way out of time. In the sixties Sellers had the original ‘Pink Panther’, Caine had ‘Gambit’ and Welch had ‘Fathom’ – but nobody was making this kind of high-class caper romp in 1978. It’s perversely, ridiculously out of time and no amount of jokes about OPEC, President Carter and the British letting a woman lead a political party is going to solve that. What’s more these are three actors who could easily have made this film ten years earlier, and now seem a bit – well – gone to seed. Sellers, as was starting to be apparent in ‘The Ideas Man’, can’t help but look like a creepy uncle as he ogles young women in bikinis; Caine has that red-faced, sweaty, over-done potato look that he would later wheel out for the likes of ‘Blame it on Rio’, while Welch does shape up well, but one wouldn’t want to leave her in front of a radiator for too long. Let’s be fair, the set-up, the script, the leads would all have appeared better and more fitting in 1968.


It’s an odd film then and that’s before we get to the Peter Sellers factor.


You can really see the importance of collaboration in a film when it isn’t happening properly. Here is a case in point. Sellers and Caine don’t actually have that many scenes together. In the few they do, there is an easy camaraderie between there, a mutual respect. One wouldn’t really believe they were brothers, but they certainly come across as two people who have known each other a long time. When they’re apart though it’s perfectly clear they’re in completely different films. Caine is a likeable cockney, a classy villain, who is looking for one final job to assuage his mid-life crisis; Sellers is a barnpot who speaks constantly in a loud, manic voice and dreams of owning Napoleon’s underpants. It seems that on getting the script for a ‘classy crime comedy’, Caine paid attention to the word ‘classy’, while Sellers blew up the word ‘comedy’ into eighteen foot high letters.


Sellers tramples over everything in his path in his desire to get a laugh. Clearly not listening to Welch’s lines so he can comically leer at her and mug to straight to camera – in addition we have raising of eyebrows, desperate hand gestures and jumping over other actor’s lines, even when they’re seemingly crucial to the plot. It’s clearly the performance of a man out of control. And Caine’s subtler take on his part just makes it look worse.


As such this is a strange out of place, utterly disjointed, film – but one which, I suppose makes you feel like you’re getting two movies for the price of one.

Captain Dinsdale (1969)

D. Cy Endfield
Colour

For someone writing a blog about neglected films with that touch of quality, the career of Mr Michael Caine is a godsend. There are so many forgotten movies, spanning so many different genres, that one sees it as a possibly never ending bounty. On a recent visit to Ireland, I found in my in-law’s cottage a newspaper box-set of Michael Caine films from the 70s and 80s, half of which I had never heard of. It has long been a hobby of mine to seek out strange and little-remembered films, and half of them I hadn’t heard of. And the great thing is, even though quality control has never been particularly high on the agenda, Michael Caine is always a class actor. Rarely will you see him sleepwalk through a film. True, he may aim for a higher performance in some movies than others, but you don’t ever see him coast. There’s always a spark of quality, a glint of something worthwhile.

So we have dozens, if not a hundred-plus films that have been pretty much forgotten but are made worthwhile by Caine’s performance.

What are we waiting for?

Sean Connery had ‘Shalako’, Elvis Presley had ‘Charro’ and Caine had ‘Captain Dinsdale’, each of them an attempt by the Hollywood studios – for whom westerns had been a staple since John Wayne swapped his bib and dummy for a six-shooter – to tap into these new young stars and that Spaghetti Western vibe. No longer would the good guy wear a white hat, no longer would one hero bring justice to a righteous town, instead there would be moral anarchy, bloody chaos and nihilism in what was now the brutal wilderness of storybook America.

Caine is the eponymous Captain Dinsdale, a British soldier now working as a bounty hunter and charged with bringing three outlaws across the desert to a military stockade. Still dressed in the battered reds of Her Majesty’s uniform, Caine rides stern faced across the desert looking like his character from ‘Zulu’ gone west and gone to seed. The convicts in his charge are the over-qualified trio of Robert Duvall, Robert Wagner and Robert Stack – and the four of them bicker and fight as they make their way over this endless sand. (Throughout it, as befits a soldier of Her Majesty’s army, Caine refers to each of these convicts by his surname. I like to imagine though that each character kept his real first name and that in other – more perverse – hands this would have become a distinctly confusing film. Gus van Sant’s ‘Gerry’ with more kick-ass explosions.) The hot sun bakes down and our foursome looks likely to plod on forever, until one day they see a green train, and Caine hatches a plan.

It might sound silly written down to think that a captor would start plotting with his captives – the three Roberts – each of whom he has spent the first half an hour of the film bickering with, the moment some easily got loot arrives in the story. But Caine manages to sell it. He is this hard and unyielding soldier, a man of determination, but not one to miss an opportunity. Before long the four of them are working together in the desert heat and we all know that cross and double cross and most likely triple cross and even quadruple cross squared are all making their way up the track.

Neither of the aforementioned ‘Charro’ or ‘Shalako’ is worthy of any note, but ‘Captain Dinsdale’ is a tense and finger-nail biting thriller. Essentially a chamber piece for the four actors, the film manages to be claustrophobic even in the expanse of the desert. Of course Caine and Duvall are by far the best performers on show and it boils down to a clash between the two of them – with Duvall excelling as the shifty, lisping, possibly gay con with an eye for the chance. It’s a characterisation which is always going to clash with Caine’s faded martinet.

Sir Michael is equally superb as Her Majesty’s soldier transported to the Western desert and remaining ever-so British. More than that, he remains ever-so cockney. It’s a wonderful performance, because it’s so incongruous in that dusty setting. Yes, this is the Michael Caine who became a Hollywood star, but it’s also the one who was Alfie and he never lets you forget it. The name ‘Alabama’, for instance, is curled so delightfully out of his South London tongue that it ends up sounding like somewhere just beyond Tooting Bec and left.

I’d recommend ‘Captain Dinsdale’ for its tense set up, great acting and by the end loads of stuff just blowing up while Caine stares impassively on. I’d recommend it for Caine’s sandy battered uniform, Robert Duvall’s ginger wig and the look on Robert Stack’s face the moment he clearly realises that the two younger actors have much better parts than he does. I’d recommend it for the bright sunlight, the chaos of the conclusion and the way Duvall stretches out the word “casssshhhh” with such vainglorious glee. I’d recommend it for Caine’s unremitting Elephant and Castle tones and the look on his face which says he knows how far he has come. And finally I’d recommend it for the sight of Sir Michael’s skin in the desert heat, and how by the end of the film he genuinely and marvellously does look like an overdone baked potato in military uniform.