The “best thriller ever,” according to Michael Caine: “If you haven’t seen it, do yourself a favour”
Michael Caine is a national treasure and a cinematic titan, so when he dubs something the best, his opinion holds a huge amount of weight.
When asked to name the “best thriller ever”, for example, Caine’s picks were extremely difficult to argue with. For starters, he pinpointed two Alfred Hitchcock classics, Psycho and Rear Window, which are surely cast-iron contenders for the top spot on any list of great thrillers.
Caine’s praise for Hitchcock isn’t as much of a gimme as you may expect, too, because he and the ‘Master of Suspense’ famously didn’t see eye to eye. In fact, after Caine refused to star in Hitch’s gruesome 1972 serial killer movie Frenzy, the offended legend stopped speaking to him, even when Caine and his wife Shakira attended the AFI Lifetime Achievement Awards honouring the director in 1979. Hilariously, Hitchcock would also blank Caine regularly in more everyday situations, with the Italian Job star once chuckling, “I would see him every Friday at Chasen’s restaurant in Los Angeles, and he would totally ignore me.”
For his next contenders, Caine chose two much more modern entries in the pantheon of thrills and spills. The Silence of the Lambs demonstrated that he didn’t have a problem with serial killer movies, per se; he just didn’t want to play one for Hitchcock. It’s undeniable, though, that Jonathan Demme’s masterful tale of a female FBI agent and the man-eating cannibal who helps her track down a skinsuit-constructing killer is one of the most harrowing thrillers ever made. However, it’s also electric to watch, and just about every scene is iconic, which is why many cinephiles (this writer included) would say it’s the best of the best.
Next up, the Get Carter icon chose Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects, a movie whose status as an exemplary thriller was virtually unchallenged until Singer’s personal conduct brought his work into disrepute in the late 2010s. Sure, Roger Ebert infamously hated the movie with a passion, but the lion’s share of critics and audiences gleefully ate up Singer and screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie’s twisty, turny tale. To this day, the identity of the mysterious crime boss Keyser Söze is a topic capable of launching a thousand pub discussions, and I’d be surprised if Caine weren’t involved in at least a handful of spirited ones over the years.
At the end of the day, though, there is only one thriller that Caine believes should be immortalised as the best, and it’s one that staked its claim 76 years ago. The Third Man, an unsettling and nail-bitingly tense film set in post-World War II Vienna, is almost the platonic ideal of film noir. It’s black and white photography, all crazy Dutch angles and deep pools of shadow are a visual feast, and the use of locations in Vienna that had been legitimately bombed out during the war lends it a realism that can’t be manufactured.
“Like all great movies, this has a fantastic sense of time and place,” Caine wrote in his memoir The Elephant to Hollywood. “Post-war Vienna is an extraordinary setting for what I consider to be the best thriller ever.”
To Caine, who has been a part of several of his own great thrillers, the “unforgettable sense of menace” created by director Carol Reed and screenwriter Graham Greene in the film is its greatest asset. As the audience watches Joseph Cotton’s author, Holly Martins, investigate the supposed death of his friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles), they are dragged deeper and deeper into a mystery in which nothing is as it seems, and that peeling of the narrative onion captivated Caine. He also marvelled at Welles’ ability to capture everything important about a film in one piece of dialogue: his iconic “cuckoo clock” speech, which the Citizen Kane auteur penned himself when unsatisfied with Greene’s script.
All things considered, Caine’s championing of The Third Man (“If you haven’t seen it, do yourself a favour and get a DVD right now!”) is difficult to pick holes in. It’s an undisputed triumph of cinema, and still the standard-bearer for Cold War espionage thrillers three-quarters of a century later. Quality pick, Sir Michael!
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