The one movie Michael Caine didn’t want anyone to see: “God help the poor audience who would”
Any career that spans 70 years is guaranteed to include a few misses to go along with the hits, and Michael Caine has always been refreshingly honest about lending his legendary gravitas to a string of terrible movies, and he’s even got his excuses at the ready whenever they’re brought up.
For every affront to the good name of cinema the two-time Academy Award winner has appeared in, he’s always had a good reason. Jaws: The Revenge? Money. The Swarm? He got to work with the likes of Henry Fonda and Olivia de Havilland. On Deadly Ground? Well, he couldn’t mount a defence of the Steven Seagal-directed monstrosity, but at least it ensured that he’d never make the same mistake again.
Caine can always be relied on to hold his hands up and admit that he’s been involved with some truly wretched pictures, but there’s only one that made him feel sorry for the potential audience. He knew it was doomed from the beginning, and there was nothing he could do about it, which left him pre-emptively remorseful.
The early-to-mid-1980s were inarguably the most bizarre period of Caine’s professional life, a period when he was alternating between Oscar-winning performances in Hannah and Her Sisters and acclaimed turns in Educating Rita with utter dross like the aforementioned Jaws sequel and The Jigsaw Man.
Despite boasting an accomplished director at the helm in John Frankenheimer, The Holcroft Covenant belonged to the latter group. Adapted from the novel of the same name by Jason Bourne creator Robert Ludlum, Caine confessed in his memoir, What’s It All About?, that being brought in as a very last-minute replacement meant he never had the time to wrap his head around the project.
“It sounded like a winner,” he said of the Frankenheimer/Ludlum combo. “Wrong again. The only certain thing was that my summer idyll was over, because as the part had originally been given to James Caan and he had dropped out at the last moment, I had to finish Water on the Friday night, and whizz off to Berlin to start filming on the Monday morning.”
Caine’s casting was so short notice that he wore his own clothes in the film because there was no time for a wardrobe fitting, which meant he had zero time to comprehend the screenplay. “Only too late did I realise that I couldn’t understand the plot,” he remarked. “So God help the poor audience who would eventually see it.”
If there are any positives to be drawn from The Holcroft Covenant, which is a stretch, Caine sort of got his wish in the end. After reading the script, he realised it was absolute nonsense that didn’t make a lick of sense, and he knew that the finished article was destined to take a hiding from critics and be unanimously rejected by those unfortunate enough to catch it on the big screen.
Fortunately, there weren’t many of them. The literary adaptation earned less than $400,000 at the box office on a budget of $13 million, so there were hardly a huge number of paying customers Caine needed to sympathise with for wasting their time on the movie.
Never Miss A Tale
The Far Out Michael Caine Newsletter
All the latest stories about Michael Caine from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.