The one movie that made Michael Caine break his golden rule
Few actors in British film history can claim to have had such a varied and well-revered career as Michael Caine. Whether he’s fighting tribesmen in Zulu or warming to some puppets in The Muppet Christmas Carol, Caine never fails to bring a classy intensity to his roles. Besides his undeniable acting talent and command of the screen as a leading man, Caine prospered thanks to a series of good decisions.
Often, decision-making is an overlooked attribute in the cutthroat world of acting, especially when it comes to eminence and permanence in Hollywood. An actor must judge which roles suit their skillset and also learn to pass on any roles that could damage their reputation, even if the financial reward seems attractive at the time. In Caine’s case, he was lucky enough to break through in Zulu, which brought him a steady stream of roles as a strong leading figure, including Alfie, The Italian Job and The Battle of Britain.
Over the past five decades, Caine has remained just as relevant, with Academy Award-winning roles in Woody Allen’s 1986 movie Hannah and Her Sisters and 1999’s The Cider House Rules. Speaking to Rolling Stone in 2019, the actor was proud to claim he never regretted any opportunities he passed on. “I never made that kind of mistake,” he said. “I only made the ones in the opposite direction — what I didn’t say no to.”
Considering Caine’s status as a bona fide legend with a stacked trophy cabinet, his regrets surely can’t be particularly troubling as he eases into retirement at 91. Still, as he reviews his oeuvre, there are a few duds he would rather forget. One of which was the 1978 movie The Swarm. Directed by Irwin Allen, the sci-fi horror followed a scientist who teams up with the US military to tackle a giant, mutant swarm of bees. The movie received mixed reviews, with some surprisingly vouching for the movie’s crazy plot, but it wasn’t quite to Caine’s taste.
Appraising the movie in 2019 as one of his few mistakes, Caine noted that, adding insult to the injury of negative early reviews, he had a shitty time shooting the film. “I said, ‘I’ll do it.’ One day, we were all having a conversation with live bees above us, and suddenly, we noticed all these little black dots on our shirts,” he said. “The bees were shitting on us. And so the first review was in, but we didn’t know it at the time.”
Another regret of Caine’s was the 1969 movie Play Dirty. As an established hero of war films, at this point, he was cast in André De Toth’s World War II adventure movie. The movie, which followed a mission to destroy a Nazi fuel depot in North Africa, was a disappointment at the box office and Caine, again, had a difficult time filming. He detested the experience so much that he vowed never to return to Almería, Spain.
The frustration of the project revolved around the fact that Almería was an exceedingly popular site for filming at the time. “There are six sand dunes in Almería… We’d all come round the hill chasing Rommel’s tanks – and there’s horse shit all over the desert and a stagecoach in the other directions being chased by Indians,” Caine recalled in his autobiography, Raising Caine.
Adding: “The other film units were forever wiping out tank tracks to get their westerns, and we were forever shovelling up horse shit and wiping out hoof prints to get our El Alamein.”
Caine elaborated on the unfortunate experience in his book What It’s All About…, noting how the disruption drove the project over budget, adding insult to injury when the box office figures came in. “Sometimes people ask me why films cost so much, and I have often been tempted to tell them these stories,” he wrote. “Unbelievable they may seem, but I swear they are all true.”
After his experiences filming Play Dirty, Caine included a clause to his future movie contracts that stated that he would never work in Almería again. He added a mantra, “The cardinal rules of bad movies: if you’re going to do a bad movie, at least do it in a great location.” Though he never returned to Almería, he claimed to have broken his rule of shooting a poor movie in a subpar location during his 1990s career slump. The movie in question was On Deadly Ground, a universally panned movie directed and co-produced and starring Steven Seagal. The movie was shot in various locations across California, Wyoming and Alaska.
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