The “boring” movie Michael Caine compared to a drunken fling: “She didn’t look as hot as she did on the beach”
There are a thousand different ways for an actor to summarise a movie they regretted making, and since he’s written four memoirs, three nonfiction books, and a mystery novel, it’s unsurprising that Michael Caine would think outside of the box to describe an experience he’d much rather forget.
The two-time Academy Award winner has starred in a lot of terrible films, and he’s always been willing to embrace them. He’s been around long enough to know that there’s no point in trying to polish a cinematic turd, so when he’s lent his name to a stinker, he doesn’t try and deny that he dropped the ball.
Caine reasoned that he was always going to have a questionable hit rate when he made so many pictures, frequently starring in multiple releases every year, a habit that he kept up for decades. There were plenty of winners, since he’s got an impressive collection of classics under his belt, but some of them are indefensible.
Then again, he had his reasons for agreeing to reprise the iconic role of Harry Palmer in a pair of made-for-television movies that were released in the mid-1990s. Or, to be more accurate, he had one reason: money. The veteran’s star had been falling for a while, and with fewer options on the table than ever before, he dusted off a character he hadn’t played in almost 30 years.
What transpired was the single most miserable moment of his long and storied career, and it left him perilously close to washing his hands of acting forever and focusing his energies on his part-time vocation as a restaurateur, until an unlikely guardian angel named Jack Nicholson salvaged him from the scrapheap.
Bullet to Beijing and Midnight in Saint Petersburg were, in fact, shite, and Caine knew it. When reflecting on the ill-judged sequels to The Guardian, he concocted a bizarre analogy. “Well, it was one of those things that seemed like a good idea at the time,” he said. “Everybody kept quoting to me things and said that they’d go and see a Harry Palmer movie if one was on. As it turned out, nobody went to see a Harry Palmer film. So I never wanted to go back and do it again.”
“It was interesting to do, but kind of boring at the same time,” he continued. “You know when you had a couple of drinks and it was a great idea? I’ll tell you what it was like. It was like a holiday romance. It wasn’t so good once you got back home; she didn’t look as hot as she did on the beach, when you’d had eight sangrias!”
Caine effectively comparing his back-to-back Harry Palmer sequels as having his professional beer goggles, or Sangria, in this case, on is pretty damning, and not what you’d call particularly progressive, either. He was right; it was a mistake to play the part again, with his equivalent of a booze-soaked holiday fling coming back to bite him when it did absolutely nothing for his flailing career.
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