Michael Caine names his five favourite movies
Most find their opinion of their favourite movie gradually shifting over time as they broaden their horizons and experience more of what cinema has to offer, but Michael Caine has never been interested in placing himself in that boat.
With a career that spanned seven decades, way over 150 films, and suffered a number of tricky ups and downs along the way, Caine has been around the block and back enough times to feel it in his bones when he knows a movie is going to work.
Conversely, he also knows when they’re going to be crap, not that he minds too much about that. The two-time Academy Award winner has starred in his fair share of flops and critical outcasts, and he’s never even attempted to defend them. Instead, Caine always finds the positives, even in the worst moments of his professional life. But all these experiences have allowed the actor to cherish the movies he holds closest to his heart.
Anytime the legendary actor is asked which movie he loves more than any other, the answer always remains the same, and it stars his favourite talent to ever grace the screen to boot. Caine has never been one to downplay his adoration of Humphrey Bogart, who stands alone as Caine’s number one acting idol.
As well as deriving his stage name from Bogart’s 1954 military drama The Caine Mutiny, it’s well-known that the two-time Academy Award winner is borderline obsessed with Casablanca. Caine has spent decades waxing lyrical on the seminal romantic epic, so it’s hardly a surprise that he’d seize the opportunity once again when pressed to name the five features he views at the top of the pile.
In another wholly unsurprising development, his favourite director appears more than once, too. It must have been the biggest pinch-me moment of Caine’s professional life when he worked with John Huston on the 1975 adventure The Man Who Would Be King, never mind the fact he got to do it again several years later when he co-starred with an eclectic array of movie stars and footballers in Escape to Victory.
Reflecting on his favoured five with Rotten Tomatoes, Huston and Bogart were well-represented. Opening his eyes to a new style of cinema, Caine recalled The Maltese Falcon as being “the first time I’d ever seen what they call a film noir,” while it was the dynamic duo’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre that led him to reflect how “if you ever heard the voice of god, it would be John Huston.”
Naturally, Casablanca makes its obligatory appearance with Caine singling out his love for the verbiage, celebrating the timeless great for being “full of dialogue”. It isn’t all about Huston and Bogart, though, with Carol Reed’s The Third Man making an appearance on the cockney superstar’s all-time list thanks partially to Orson Welles’ grandstanding cuckoo clock monologue.
Star-studded rom-com Charade boasts Cary Grant, Audrey Hepburn, Walter Matthau, James Coburn, and George Kennedy among its ensemble, but one “wonderful moment” between the two leading lights stood out. “They’re having a row and she says, ‘You know what’s wrong with you, don’t you?'” Caine recalled. “He says, ‘What?’. And she says, ‘Nothing.'”
A clear appreciation for the ‘Golden Age’ of Hollywood, then, with the likes of Huston, Bogart, Welles, Grant, and Hepburn all playing their part in searing themselves into Caine’s cinematic consciousness.
Michael Caine’s five favourite movies:
- The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941)
- Charade (Stanley Donen, 1963)
- The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (John Huston, 1948)
- The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949)
- Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942)
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