The Elephant to Hollywood

by Michael Caine

  I saw my London friends earlier in the week. We had a dinner at the Cipriani in Mayfair and, appropriately enough, several of the Mayfair Orphans were there to help me celebrate. Johnny Gold, nightclub owner extraordinaire, is now golfer-in-the-Bahamas ordinaire – but he’s very happy. Photographer Terry O’Neill is more successful than ever. Philip Kingsley, the trichologist, came along with his wife Joan, who is a psychiatrist (I’ve always thought what a great team they would be if going bald was driving you mad) and so did our occasional member Michael Winner, there to enjoy the food for once, not to criticise it. My daughters Dominique and Natasha were there, as well as Natasha’s husband Michael and Shakira’s friend Emile, whom she has known since their early days in Guyana. I was happy to see my old friend the South African hotel mogul Sol Kerzner, whom I first met filming Zulu, and his wife Heather, who shares a birthday with me, and – along with Michael Winner – representing the film world, the movie producer Norma Heyman, with whom I worked on The Honorary Consul. I always love Norma’s story about her son, David, who told her one day that he wanted to be a movie producer like her and had bought a little children’s story to start with. It was called Harry Potter . . . I love the movie business – you couldn’t make it up! The departed members of the Mayfair Orphans were represented by Chrissie Most, the widow of our Mickie. It was one of those evenings that we all knew would be good, but which because of the bond between us all, turned out to be truly special.

  And then last Wednesday, I had the third part of my birthday celebrations. Sol Kerzner threw a party at the nightclub Annabel’s for Heather and as it was my birthday, too, I was part of the occasion. The first thrill for me was being able to get into the club without wearing a tie – something that would have been impossible when the founder, Mark Birley, was alive. The second was finding it was as full of beautiful, elegant people of all four sexes (maybe even as many as five or six – I haven’t been out much lately) as it ever was in my younger days. I didn’t recognise any of them, though, which was rather disturbing – although I could tell they were all very important. Shakira saw I was looking a bit puzzled and took pity on me. ‘They’re either from the fashion industry,’ she whispered, ‘or so rich we don’t know them!’ Well – that was a relief. And I was further relieved to find fellow Mayfair Orphan Johnny Gold among the crowd. I stuck to him like a limpet, because the music was so loud I couldn’t hear anyone introduce themselves. I really am getting old, I thought.

  It was a spectacular evening with magnificent food and an incredible cabaret entertainment, including six beautiful dancers kicking high, up close and personal. Fortunately they were wearing very sensible knickers – the sort my mother had told me, when as a small boy I had shown an early interest, were made of something called blue winceyette. Sensible, and not in the least titillating. This was followed by the star cast of Jersey Boys and then the five of us who had birthdays to celebrate – Heather, me, Sir Philip Green of Topshop fame, Patrick Cox, the shoe designer, and Tracey Emin’s boyfriend, photographer Scott Douglas – were all called on stage and presented with chocolate birthday cakes iced with ‘love is all you need’.

  Love wasn’t quite what was in the air everywhere, though – just as Heather was making a speech noting, ‘There’s so much love in the room tonight,’ down in the throng Hugh Grant had called PR man Matthew Freud a stupid c*** and Matthew had rubbed his slice of chocolate birthday cake all the way down the front of Hugh’s shirt. Hugh hit back with a punch to Matthew’s nose, which missed and caught him on the cheekbone. Matthew retaliated by throwing a glass of wine at Hugh, which missed him and soaked Johnny Gold instead. Matthew stormed out of the room clutching his cheek, waiters mysteriously appeared with a clean shirt for Hugh and the party turned into a disco and we danced the rest of the night away. Trust a PR man, though (or, rather, don’t trust a PR man) because Matthew Freud had the last word and emailed pictures of Hugh Grant’s chocolatey shirt to all his friends the next day.

  So from a high-octane celebrity party to a small dinner with old friends and then – and happiest of all – to a day at home with three generations of my family – I have had a birthday I’ll always remember. It seems to me, too, as I sit here finishing this book, that my three birthday celebrations also reflect the distance I’ve travelled – from the Elephant all the way to Hollywood and back. It was a tough start, it’s had some low moments and it’s had incredible highs, but it’s been a rich and rewarding journey – and it’s not over yet!

  My Top Ten Favourite Movies of All Time . . .

  All my life I have been an avid movie fan, which is why, I suppose, I ended up in the business. I love movies – I can even find something to like in the bad ones – but I do have an all-time Top Ten. Here they are in reverse order . . .

  10. Tell No One, 2006

  This is a French film and one of the best thrillers I have ever seen. It’s adapted from the brilliant novel by American thriller writer Harlan Coben – who actually appears in the film as the man who follows our hero, Bruno, into the station – and I’ve always been a bit surprised that it wasn’t bought by an American studio. Bruno is played by François Cluzet, who gives it a slight American feel as he looks very like Dustin Hoffman, and the great English turned French actress, Kristin Scott Thomas, co-stars. The blurb alone is enough to draw you in: ‘A husband and wife, out together, are badly beaten by a person unknown. The husband survives, but the wife dies. The wife’s father identifies her body and they bury her. Seven years later, the husband gets an email from his dead wife saying, “Meet me in the park in an hour.”’ I couldn’t resist – the film is stunning.

  9. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, 1948

  This is a movie involving two of my favourite artists: Humphrey Bogart, whom I never got to meet, and John Huston, who directed me in two of my favourite films, The Man Who Would Be King and Escape to Victory. As I’ve said before, I’ve always thought that if God spoke he would sound like John Huston, a deep voice of experience and wisdom and in this film you can actually hear John’s voice. He plays a man who keeps getting hit on by Bogart’s character, who is begging in the street, and John gives him a lecture. I’d listen to a lecture from John Huston any day – his voice is completely mesmerising. I first saw when it came out – and I felt it was a metaphor for my own life. It features a load of dumb sods searching for a treasure; and there I was, a dumb sod searching for my own treasure – only in my case, that was a career in the movies. The crazy old man, played by Walter Huston, knows where the treasure is – and fortunately for me, as I went through my life I met my own Walter Hustons. There is a great scene in the movie when Bogart says, ‘We’re never going to find the gold’ and Huston starts to laugh and he does this little skip and dance, saying, ‘You’re so dumb, you don’t even see the riches you’re treadin’ on with your own feet . . .’ and Bogart and Tim Holt look mystified and then they look down and they are standing on it . . .

  8. Gone with the Wind, 1939

  This was the first movie in colour to win a Best Picture Oscar and, taking inflation into account, it is still the highest grossing picture ever. The book, by Margaret Mitchell, was turned down by every major Hollywood studio and picked up in the end by the independent producer David O. Selznick. Selznick was a genius at doing movies on the cheap. Apart from using the front door of his own studio as the front door to Tara, he saved money at both ends in the scene of the burning of Atlanta by setting fire to several old sets he wanted to get rid of on the back lot. The first director on the movie was a brilliant, gentle and very sensitive man called George Cukor, and although Selznick fired him and replaced him with Victor Fleming, a brusque, tough, action director, neither Vivien Leigh nor Olivia de Havilland liked the change and continued to seek private direction from Cukor. This was also the film in which Clark Gable said ‘Damn’. It had, of course, been said in a film before, but it caused controversy because Gone with the Wind was so big . . . I can watch this movie time and time again without tiring of i
t. It is a timeless classic.

  7. All That Jazz, 1979

  This is my favourite musical and Bob Fosse, who directed and choreographed it, is my favourite choreographer – he also directed two of my other favourite musicals, Cabaret, which won eight Oscars, including one for Bob for Best Director, and Sweet Charity, which had my friend and mentor Shirley Maclaine dancing up a storm and featured a great number by Sammy Davis Junior, ‘The Rhythm of Life’. But it is the music and dancing in All That Jazz that makes it stand out for me – that, plus the performance of Roy Schneider in the lead. When I was an out-of-work actor I had worked as a stage hand on Bob Fosse’s stage production of The Pajama Game, but I didn’t get to know him personally until he and I and several other actors danced with the Rockettes’ chorus line at Radio City Music Hall in 1985. We were lined up in alphabetical order and I was next to Charles Bronson – who turned out to be an unexpectedly great chorus dancer. We were down one end with the slightly older chorus ladies, who were known as the Dirty Dozen. A bit further down the line, Rock Hudson got the younger fresher ones – which was a bit of a waste, come to think of it.

  6. The Maltese Falcon, 1941

  This was the first gangster thriller I ever saw, and the first film John Huston ever directed. It was also the first of a series of three films that the then big star George Raft turned down, which consequently turned Humphrey Bogart into an icon. Bogart is fantastic, of course, but he’s backed up by an equally strong cast including Sidney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre. I fell in love with Dashiell Hammett’s dialogue and started to read his books whenever I could run them to earth in Fifties London. In fact Hammett wrote my favourite thriller line ever: ‘It was dark – and it wasn’t just the night.’ The Maltese Falcon was the start of my love affair with film noir – which continues to this day.

  5. Some Like It Hot, 1959

  This remains one of the funniest films I have ever seen – and the most daring comedy. I had never seen a film where the stars dressed in drag; in the Fifties it was unheard of. Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis took a real chance with this and with the help of Billy Wilder and his script and the inspired casting of Marilyn Monroe, they made it an all-time great comedy. Many years later I was very close friends with both Irving Lazar and Billy Wilder and Irving told me he was with Billy when he showed the film to the critics for the first time and there was not a laugh during the entire film. After the show they went to Hamburger Hamlet and tough, unsentimental Billy burst into tears. He should have remembered the old theatre adage: ‘a paper [complementary] house never laughs’. I was having dinner with Billy one night and I asked him if Marilyn Monroe had been difficult to work with and he said that she had been. ‘She was always late,’ he said, ‘and she didn’t know her lines. But then,’ he went on, ‘I could have cast my Aunt Martha, and she would have been on time and she would have known her lines, but who the hell would have gone to see her?’ A typical Billy Wilder comment . . .

  4. Charade, 1963

  This is my favourite romantic movie of all time – it is also a great comedy and a great thriller and of course it is set in one of my favourite cities in the world, Paris. It’s also, in my view, one of the most underrated movies of all time. The film has a great sense of nostalgia for me as they shot a whole sequence in Les Halles, the old food market where we all used to go in the Sixties at two o’clock in the morning after all the nightclubs closed, to have French onion soup. The relationship between Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn is of course the main attraction of the film: they were superb. It’s full of brilliant one-liners and these two actors deliver them immaculately. Here are two of my favourites:

  Regina (Audrey Hepburn): I already know a lot of people and until one of them dies I couldn’t possibly meet anyone else.

  Peter (Cary Grant): Well, if anyone goes on the critical list, let me know . . .

  And . . .

  Regina: You know what’s wrong with you, don’t you?

  Peter: No. What?

  Regina: Nothing.

  Brilliant, isn’t it?

  3. On the Waterfront, 1954

  This film was a revelation to me. The script by Budd Schulberg, the direction of Elia Kazan and the performances of the actors took me into a working-class reality in a way that I had never experienced in a movie before. Marlon Brando, Karl Malden, Rod Steiger and Eva Marie Saint were all Method Actors. There are two main principles: the first is that the rehearsal is the work and the performance the relaxation, so by the time you get to work in front of a camera you should be so familiar with what you are doing it seems effortless. The second principle is that your acting should come from sense memory, finding a moment in your own life to produce a real and instant emotion – I use it to this day, if I am required to cry. Not that I think of some great tragic incident, it’s just something that struck me as terribly sad. I’ve never told anyone – not even Shakira, to whom I am closer to than anyone else in the world – what that moment is. If I did, I would then be thinking of her reaction rather than my own and it would lose its power. The result in this film is quite extraordinary – especially in that iconic scene in which Marlon Brando as Terry and Rod Steiger as Charlie are in the back of the car and Terry says, ‘I coulda been a contender. I could have been somebody . . .’ Unforgettable.

  2. The Third Man, 1949

  Another Graham Greene novel – this time he adapted it for screen himself. And like all great movies, this has a fantastic sense of time and place. Post-war Vienna is an extraordinary setting for what I consider to be the best thriller ever. (Although films like Psycho, Rear Window, The Usual Suspects and Silence of the Lambs all run it as close seconds.) It was photographed in black and white by Robert Krasker with strange camera angles and a gritty documentary style and it has an unsettling and unforgettable sense of menace. The cast is fabulous – Joseph Cotton and Orson Welles in particular – the first time they had appeared together since Citizen Kane. The movie is full of so many memorable sequences it is hard to pull out just one, but perhaps I would point to the scene in which Harry Lime and Holly Martins are at the top of the giant Ferris wheel overlooking Vienna and Martins asks Harry if he has ever seen any of his victims . . . Harry brushes it off and after they get back down to the ground says to Holly as he’s walking away, ‘Like the fella says, in Italy for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love – they had five hundred years of democracy and peace and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. So long, Holly.’ Genius – and this line was written not by Graham Greene, but by Orson Welles himself. Then there’s the action climax and the chase through the sewers and the romantic climax where Joseph Cotton is waiting at the cemetery gates as Alida Valli is coming away from Harry Lime’s funeral. It’s a long walk towards him – will she stop? Or will she walk straight past? I’m not going to tell you. If you haven’t seen it, do yourself a favour and get a DVD right now!

  1. Casablanca, 1942

  Well – what else was it going to be? It should have been just another reasonably successful movie churned out by Hollywood. In fact, it probably shouldn’t have worked at all. It started shooting without a finished screenplay, from a play that had never seen the stage called Everybody Comes to Rick’s. I met Julius Epstein, one of the twin brothers responsible for the screenplay, and he asked me if I knew the traffic light at the bottom of Benedict at Sunset Boulevard just by the Beverly Hills Hotel. I told him I knew it well and I hated it because it always seemed to stay red for about five minutes. He smiled. ‘It was waiting at that traffic light every day,’ he said, ‘that my brother Philip and I wrote a lot of Casablanca . . .’

  The studio wanted William Wyler to direct and ended up with Michael Curtz, who was, apparently, a very irritable and insensitive director. He was, however, responsible for a phrase still used today in English-speaking crews all over the world for a non-sound sequence. He was a Hungaria
n and whenever he wanted to do a scene without recorded sound he would shout out, ‘Mitt out sound!’, which became abbreviated to MOS.

  It was another of those three films that Humphrey Bogart was only in because George Raft turned the part down and the studio had changed their mind about the original casting which was (picture this . . .) Ronald Reagan and Ann Sheridan. There was another problem: Bogart was about two inches shorter than Ingrid Bergman. I can’t imagine anyone asking Bogart to stand on a box, so this must have meant very difficult set-ups. On screen the two of them had a fantastic relationship, but that wasn’t the case off-screen and nor was it the case with the brilliant supporting cast, which includes Sidney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre and, of course, Claude Rains who nearly stole the film as Captain Renault. In fact, as Julius put it, ‘Nobody burst into tears when the movie finished shooting . . .’

  But in spite of that, the film has gone on to be not only at the top of my list, but at the top of most people’s list. The music is memorable, and of course it contains some of the most often-quoted lines in the whole of the movie business. There are too many to mention here, but Rick’s line, ‘Of all the gin-joints in all the world, she walks into mine,’ stands out as one of the most poignant. And then there’s Rick’s famous last line, ‘I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.’ It wasn’t even in the original script. It was written by the producer, Hal Wallis and dubbed by Bogart later over the shot of him and Claude Rains walking away into the mist. To me this looks like Hal Wallis – who was a very smart producer – hinting at the studio for a sequel. It never happened – and perhaps it’s best that we leave it on that note. For me, Casablanca will always be number one.