The terrible movie that made a fitting mess of Michael Caine: “They crapped all over us”
Making a bad movie or two is an inescapable inevitability of a long acting career, and while many of the stars to slum it in shitty films have distanced themselves from those roles or disavowed them completely, Michael Caine has always worn his biggest misfires as a badge of honour.
Jaws: The Revenge is undoubtedly one of his lowest points onscreen, and it caused him to miss out on the chance to collect his first Academy Award in person when the shoot overlapped with the Oscars naming him ‘Best Supporting Actor’ for Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters. Did he mind? No, because it paid him a lot of money.
Similarly, the legend was utterly miserable reprising one of his most iconic characters when shooting back-to-back Harry Palmer sequels in Russia that would never be released in cinemas. He hated the experience but used it as the catalyst to make a concerted effort to seek out better parts and begin climbing out of another downward slump.
Steven Seagal’s On Deadly Ground earned the first-time filmmaker a Razzie for ‘Worst Director’, and Caine was clearly disinterested in playing the villain, even if his hammy performance has a couple of bright spots. It was an awful picture, albeit one that allowed the actor to craft his cardinal rules for picking projects that he’d follow from that day on.
After another woeful outing in Beyond the Poseidon Adventure, Caine was already familiar with the disaster genre, which didn’t dissuade him from seeing if a second time would mark the charm. Signing on for producer Irwin Allen’s star-studded The Swarm, it was easy to see why the calibre of the cast enticed him to deal with a murderous cabal of bees.
“Henry Fonda, one of my favourite actors,” he told NPR. “Dick Widmark, I was working with all my good guys.” Beyond those two, The Swarm also found space for Oscar winners and icons, including Olivia de Havilland, Patty Duke, Jose Ferrer, Lee Grant, and Katharine Ross, an ensemble more suited to awards-baiting prestige fare than a B-tier creature feature.
Caine figured out fairly early on that The Swarm was going to be crap, and it came via an ominously ironic sign of things to come. “We were wearing white smocks or doctors’ coats, and they all these bees go out of these hives, thousands of them,” he said. “And they came in, and we suddenly noticed that our white smocks sort of started to get a very, very pale brown nest. What we didn’t realise was that bees, when caged, do not defecate in their habitation, shall we shay.”
Instead, they “wait until the moment they’re released and sort of busting themselves,” which meant that when half a million of the little critters were released all over Caine and his compadres, “they crapped all over us.” It was technically the first review The Swarm ever got, and those bees were hardly alone in shitting all over the film, which the two-time Oscar winner has repeatedly pointed to as one of the worst things he’s ever been in.
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