The director Michael Caine struggled to get a smile from: “I pride myself on being able to make people laugh”
It can’t be easy being a director; you have to make the film you envisaged, on budget, to a tight schedule, plus you have to deal with the egos of actors, the crew wanting a tea break every hour and make sure you get that all-important tracking shot framed perfectly.
Not surprisingly, there have been a fair few of them with, shall we say, temper issues, like Kubrick, Fincher and Hitchcock. And according to Michael Caine, you can add another to the list.
The director in question is Joseph Losey, an American who by virtue of having gone to study in Germany after World War II managed to get himself Blacklisted on his return, forcing him to leave the States and pursue a career in the UK instead, possibly a reason for his famously grumpy disposition. He directed a string of films during the 1950s and ‘60s, most notably starring British actor Dirk Bogarde, like Accident in 1967 and the WWI drama King and Country. In the early 1970s, he won a Palme d’Or for The Go-Between starring Julie Christie, and it was later that decade that he had his run-in with Caine.
As the actor recounts in his biography: “Although I had loved being in Kenya, after (1975 thriller) The Wilby Conspiracy, I was keen to settle down in England for a while and so I took on a so-called art movie, The Romantic Englishwoman. Joseph Losey, the director of The Romantic Englishwoman, was not a bundle of laughs, for a start. He had one of those very grim faces and didn’t crack a smile from the first day of shooting to the last. I pride myself on being able to make people laugh and bet one of the crew a tenner that I’d get one from Joe by the end of the film. I lost hands down.”
Caine was a major global star during that decade, on the back of his iconic Harry Palmer spy movies ten years previously and the legendary comedy The Italian Job in 1969. He had a succession of big films during the 1970s, starting off with dark UK revenge tale Get Carter in 1971 and then on to movies with sizable budgets, including the massively acclaimed The Man Who Would be King alongside Sean Connery and The Eagle Has Landed with Robert Duvall and Donald Sutherland.
Caine made another war-set movie with Connery in 1977 called A Bridge Too Far, and indeed, war has proved to be a rich seam for Caine over the years. In total he made 13 movies based around various conflicts, the pick of which were 1964’s essential British Army epic Zulu and the brilliant football crossover Escape to Victory, which is notable if only for some of the most hilariously unrealistic soccer scenes ever filmed, and the sight of Sylvester Stallone as a hapless American who hasn’t ever played before and so just batters people.
There’s little doubt Caine had a much better time filming the star-studded affair than he did on the Losey production, of which he added: “The whole movie turned out to be rather a serious business – certainly compared with The Wilby Conspiracy, which had been about a serious business, but still managed to be fun at the same time.”
Caine co-starred with Glenda Jackson on The Romantic Englishwoman, which barely broke even at the box office on release.
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