The “completely unremarkable” movie Michael Caine only made to avoid going broke
It’s refreshing to hear an actor being transparent sometimes. Michael Caine is nothing if not sincere, and he has never hidden the fact that he has taken on various bad movie roles just for the money. Usually, I’d raise an eyebrow at an actor accepting a part purely for the cash, but with the honesty and frankness that Caine uses to tell his stories, you can hardly blame him.
We’ve all had times when we’ve had to work a job we’ve not wanted to do, purely because we needed money. That’s just how life works. Even if you’re a star of the film industry, that doesn’t mean you’re going to have constant job offers rolling in for movies that will end up earning acclaim. Often, a talented star will find themselves struggling to land the right role, but they’ll opt to take a step back in order to preserve their career’s reputation, refusing to rush into the first project sent their way.
Others aren’t as fussy, and when Michael Caine needs an extra cheque, he’ll take on whatever if it means financial security. Besides, he’s been in enough good movies to excuse the bad ones, having started his career in a string of 1960s hits like Alfie, The Ipcress File, and The Italian Job. So, in the 1970s, when he began to transition into more Hollywood-based productions than British ones, he decided to move out to the iconic home of celebrity and stardom with his wife, Shakira Caine.
However, he soon realised that it wasn’t going to be that simple. In his memoir What’s It All About, Caine wrote, “Shakira and I quickly made the decision to move to Los Angeles, a place we both knew well and liked very much and where we already had friends. However, property out there was very expensive and my accountant informed me that I was now more or less penniless, with the exception of the money I could get for selling the Mill House.”
So, what was he to do? Even though he had many critical and commercial successes under his belt, Caine had obviously spent a lot of the money he’d already earned. There was only one solution. Make another film. “Panicking, I accepted the first offer of work that came along, to make a picture called The Silver Bears,” he wrote.
The film was directed by Ivan Passer, with Cyril Shepherd starring alongside Caine, but it wasn’t exactly a memorable endeavour. Caine portrayed a mob accountant, playing into his well-known gangster archetype. Evidently, he picked a stereotypical role that would come easily to him as a quick money fix, and it worked, even if he didn’t like the film.
Elaborating, “This was completely unremarkable except for two things. One that I worked with, an actor called Jay Leno, whom I thought very funny and who, in fact, became a famous comedian and chat-show host in America. And two, Louis Jourdan and his wife Quique joined our set of Hollywood friends.”
So, The Silver Bears might not have been one of Caine’s greatest works, but like Jaws: The Revenge, it paid his bills.
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