The Michael Caine movie that his co-star wants to delete from history: “a dirty old man’s fantasy”
There is no number high enough to count all the movies that have not aged well. Name any movie, ever, and chances are it has some not-so-savoury elements to it that look pretty icky by modern standards. Michael Caine has been in the business since the 1950s and has done his fair share of good and bad films, many of which have aged somewhat poorly. For the most part, it’s easy to overlook sexism in old movies simply because it was a different time, but there was one movie of his that was beyond the pale, even when it was released.
In the 1980s, Caine was going through a particularly uneven period in his filmography. He was nominated for an Oscar in 1984 for Educating Rita and starred in the Sidney Lumet comedy mystery Deathtrap, but he also had a string of failures, including the atrocious spy thriller Jigsaw Man in 1983 and the disastrous 1985 satire Water. Worst of them all, however, was a little sex caper about a businessman who travels to Rio with his daughter and friend, only to have a steamy affair with the friend’s teenage daughter.
Directed by Singin’ in the Rain auteur Stanley Donen in the last and lowest moment of his career, Blame It on Rio starred 51-year-old Caine as the businessman, Joseph Bologna as his friend, Demi Moore as Caine’s daughter, and 19-year-old Michelle Johnson as the daughter who seduces Caine’s character with so much determination and despite so much protest from him that it would be considered assault if the genders were reversed.
It was an absolutely ludicrous premise that was somehow trashier in its execution than it was on the page. It was based on the 1977 French film Un moment d’égarement, but it lacked all the charm, and certainly the class, that that film had.
Moore, who was just getting started as an actor at the time and who has been completely comfortable in many sexually explicit films over the years, has been pretty unequivocal about the movie. It was, she wrote in her memoir, “really a dirty old man’s fantasy – it could never be made today.”
She suspected that Johnson’s breasts “were a major factor in the casting – which also seemed par for the course in those days.” Considering how frequently she is shown topless or scantily clad (the film’s poster is centred on a photo of Johnson in a bikini, shot from behind), this seems like a reasonable assumption.
Caine has been less direct about the film. In his memoir, he simply writes, “[U]nfortunately the charm of the original [French film] was lost in translation and it got panned by the critics.” It was indeed panned. In his review, Roger Ebert said that it had “the mind of a 1940s bongo comedy and the heart of a porno film” and noted that it was “really unsettling to see how casually this movie takes a serious situation.” When someone is saying that in the 1980s, it’s a red flag. Luckily, neither Moore nor Caine’s careers were harmed by it, though Johnson’s career never took off. Donen, meanwhile, retired sharpish.
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