Michael Caine names the greatest love scene of his career: “That was incredible”
Michael Caine has done a lot of romantic scenes in his seven-decade career. Having stuck with his cockney accent and embraced the ‘Swinging Sixties’, he became a working-class icon of the silver screen at a time when British culture was taking the world by storm. He may not have had the matinee idol looks of his pal Peter O’Toole, but he brought charisma to the screen, making him a definitive heartthrob of the era.
The love scenes that Caine has played over the course of his decades in the profession are almost too numerous to count. Early on, there was his breakthrough title role in 1966’s Alfie, in which he played a devil-may-care womaniser with a string of affairs. In 1971’s Get Carter, he played a tough gangster who is caught in the act with one woman and has such passionate phone sex with another that the scene was cut when the film was released in certain markets. Then, there was the controversial romance in Blame It on Rio, in which Caine (who was in his 50s at the time) plays a man who has a steamy affair with his best friend’s teenage daughter, played by 17-year-old Michelle Johnson.
It’s unlikely that Caine would have chosen this latter film when asked about his favourite cinematic love scene, but if he had chosen it, it would have been less surprising than the one he actually did end up picking. During an interview with Vulture in 2015, the actor said that he’d recently been told by a journalist that his best love scene was the moment he said goodbye to Batman in The Dark Rises. Caine might have laughed in the person’s face, but instead, he said, “You know, I can’t think of a love scene that I did with a lady that was better than that.”
In Christopher Nolan’s Batman series, Caine plays Bruce Wayne’s loyal butler, Alfred Pennyworth. Throughout the trilogy, he is the one character Wayne can rely on no matter the circumstances, and he is also his legal guardian following the death of his parents. By the end of the trilogy, their relationship has fractured. Wayne wants to become Batman again to stop Bane from terrorising Gotham, but Alfred wants him to leave that part of his life behind.
The scene in which Alfred says goodbye to Wayne is full of emotion. The butler tries to stop Wayne from returning to the streets as his dark alter-ego and even resorts to telling him about the letter that his late girlfriend Rachel had written to him, saying that she would never marry him because he was too obsessed with being Batman. Caine and Christian Bale play the scene for all they’ve got, and it’s hard to imagine that any cinema had a single dry eye by the time Wayne walks away from him.
According to Caine, that scene proved that, even in his late 80s, he continued to grow as an actor. In fact, he implied that age was actually a bonus when it comes to accessing stronger emotions. “You can get deeper as you get older,” he explained. The scene in The Dark Knight Rises has none of the steamy passion that Caine showed in romantic scenes in earlier movies, but in terms of expressing love and plumbing the depths of emotion, it’s tough to beat.
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