The director Michael Caine called the second coming of Alfred Hitchcock: “The best moments of suspense”
As one of his generation’s marquee names, Michael Caine spent seven decades working across stage and screen, lending his name to a string of classic movies, delivering countless unforgettable performances, and rubbing shoulders with some of the industry’s greatest directors.
Alfred Hitchcock wasn’t one of the iconic auteurs he collaborated with, but that was a matter of choice. The ‘Master of Suspense’ approached Caine after envisioning him as the star of the 1972 thriller Frenzy, which turned out to be the penultimate entry in a storied filmography.
Although Caine had played his fair share of scoundrels and womanisers, he still dictated his career by an ironclad set of principles. Because he didn’t want to play a sadistic killer who murdered women, he declined Hitchcock’s offer to ignite a long-running rift between them that would see the director ignore him anytime they were in the same place at the same time.
He could have added his name to the collection of iconic Hitchcock leading men that included Cary Grant, James Stewart, Paul Newman, Sean Connery, Henry Fonda, and Bruce Dern, among others, but he couldn’t bring himself to play a character that repulsed him. The two-time Academy Award winner didn’t regret it, though, and he eventually ingratiated himself with the next best thing.
Having been directed by Carol Reed, John Huston, Brian De Palma, Ken Russell, Vittorio De Sica, Joseph L Mankiewicz, Richard Attenborough, Oliver Stone, Sidney Lumet, and Alfonso Cuarón, Caine has been in close proximity to a number of inimitable auteurs who changed cinema. However, only one of them earned Hitchcock comparisons, and it was Christopher Nolan, the filmmaker he worked with the most.
“I’ve had intimate direction from great directors, but I’ve never had the sort of intimacy and minimalist direction I get from Chris,” he explained to The Times. “He reminds me of Hitchcock, the way that everything is about creating the best moments of suspense.”
Of course, Caine had already mentioned Nolan and David Lean in the same breath, but both make for apt descriptors in their own way. The former’s sense of scale and awe-inspiring spectacle is cut from a similar cloth as the mastermind behind several of cinema’s great epics like Lawrence of Arabia and Dr Zhivago, while his penchant for white-knuckle thrills isn’t a million miles away from Hitchcock’s oeuvre.
While there’s nothing in Nolan’s back catalogue that feels overtly or blatantly Hitchcockian, his assuredness in staging riveting set pieces and embracing cinema’s technological possibilities doesn’t make it an unfounded comparison.
Besides, Caine has worked with Nolan more often than any other actor over the course of a fruitful two-decade partnership, so who’s going to argue if the veteran calls him the second coming of the ‘Master of Suspense’?
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