The only director Michael Caine regretted working with twice: “I had no qualms, but I should have”
If an actor makes a movie with a director and enjoys the experience, then the chances are high they’ll agree to work with them again should an offer come their way. It sounds obvious, and it is, which is why it was so bizarre for Michael Caine to agree to reunite with the filmmaker responsible for his worst film.
If a picture is poorly directed by someone who’s quite clearly out of their depth, and then that picture bombs at the box office, takes a critical pasting, and gains the unwanted reputation of being ranked among the worst in cinema history, then common sense would surely indicate that anyone unfortunate enough to be involved would refuse to share a set with them ever again.
And yet, Caine didn’t learn his lesson. Throughout his career, the two-time Academy Award winner made a habit of hoovering up frequent collaborators, making at least two features with Christopher Nolan, Andre De Toth, Bryan Forbes, Guy Hamilton, John Huston, John Mackenzie, and Lewis Gilbert.
He showed loyalty to the people he liked, which is fair enough. However, despite knowing from the very beginning that Irwin Allen’s directorial debut, The Swarm, was doomed to fail, and then consistently branding it as the worst entry in his filmography for the next four decades, he agreed to a rapid-fire reunion.
The dismal killer bee catastrophe was released in July 1978, and two months later, Caine started working on Irwin’s sophomore effort, Beyond the Poseidon Adventure. In his defence, the original was an Oscar-winning classic that became the highest-grossing movie of 1973, but lightning didn’t strike twice.
“I had no qualms about this one, but I should have done,” Caine wrote in his memoir, What’s It All About. “My first qualm should have been the fact that Irwin had decided to direct his second attempt, The Swarm being the first! While I loved Irwin, and he was a great producer, a director he certainly wasn’t.”
Much like The Swarm, Beyond the Poseidon Adventure was a critical pariah and a commercial disaster. In fact, it made less money and landed worse reviews than Caine’s first film with Allen behind the camera, and it goes without saying that he regretted making another movie that entered his all-time worst list.
“Although the picture wasn’t as dire as Ashanti, it was not Gone with the Wind either,” he explained, desperately trying to find a positive. “I did, however, learn to scuba dive.” It’s an understatement to say Caine went zero-for-two with Allen as his director when both efforts were equally awful, but he did make the most of his scuba training and picked up a new hobby, which is a very minor positive to draw from a pair of truly shambolic blockbusters.
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