The movie Michael Caine admitted was a disaster: “We just screamed and shouted”
He might be a living legend, a two-time Academy Award winner, and one of the United Kingdom’s greatest-ever actors, but Michael Caine has nonetheless appeared in more than his fair share of terrible movies.
Of course, that’s one of the many inevitabilities of a big screen career that stretched from 1950 to 1923, but at least Caine developed a habit of having greatness outstrip mediocrity. He was plenty prolific during his legendary stint in cinema and lent his immense talents to a number of phenomenal films, but nobody ever boasts a 100% success rate.
Caine has never been shy in admitting the only reason he signed on for Jaws: The Revenge was because it offered a lucrative payday in a glamorous location, even if the shoot for the shark attack sequel forced him to miss one of his crowning achievements when he was unable to collect his ‘Best Supporting Actor’ Oscar for Woody Allen’s Hannah and her Sisters in person.
B-tier creature feature The Swarm marks another low point in his filmography, but again, Caine saw it as an important learning experience because he was working in close proximity to a number of Hollywood greats, including Olivia de Havilland, Richard Chamberlain, and Henry Fonda.
Even though he knew it was going to be terrible long before it had a chance to hit cinemas and be burned at the stake by critics and audiences alike, Caine nonetheless re-teamed with director Irwin Allen the very next year for Beyond the Poseidon Adventure in what unfortunately marked one of the greatest drop-offs in quality between an opening instalment and its follow-up there’s ever been.
Whereas the Gene Hackman-fronted Poseidon Adventure recouped its budget more than 25 times over at the box office, won two Oscars from nine nominations, and endured as one of the greatest disaster flicks of all time, the sequel was anything but. A listless successor with none of the excitement, extravagance, or ingenuity of the film that came before, Caine recalled the experience of shooting it as a particularly disastrous one.
Referring to it as “a movie where we were divers” but not by name, Caine aptly recalled Beyond the Poseidon Adventure as “a disaster”. His biggest issues came from trying to shoot underwater scenes with minimal oxygen, which left him and his co-stars struggling. “You think you’re going to die and you keep screaming for them to give you oxygen and everyone’s breathing and everything and then you make a shot,” he told Collider. “We just screamed and shouted and we were surrounded by sharks which were obviously put in later.”
It sounds like a suitably strange way to spend a production, but Caine’s dismay was hardly worth it in the long run when Beyond the Poseidon Adventure ironically sank without a trace to be quickly forgotten.
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