The movie Michael Caine calls his “most wretched”
Undoubtedly among the towering legends of the film industry, Michael Caine has built a stellar filmography that spans decades. Featuring collaborations with directors like Mike Hodges and Christopher Nolan, Caine has demonstrated the kind of longevity and versatility that most aspiring actors can only dream of.
Still maintaining an active approach to his career, Caine has delivered countless iconic performances in gems like The Italian Job and Get Carter that have solidified his status as a true global star. However, when he was first trying to break through as an actor with real international appeal, Caine made some professional decisions that he regrets to this day.
In his autobiography What’s It All About, he opened up about some of the projects that continue to haunt him because of their terrible quality. While his involvement in the Jaws sequel is often the first to be brought up as an example, the movie Caine considered to be the bottom of the barrel was Richard Fleischer’s 1979 action-adventure flick, Ashanti.
Caine wrote: “California Suite got good reviews, and so did I, which helped after the tanning we received for The Swarm. The only problem with the part from a financial point of view was that it was only one of four separate segments in the film, and so I only got paid a quarter of my fee. I quickly looked round, desperate for something to help me get to America, and I found it – a picture called Ashanti. ‘I’ve never heard of that one,’ I hear you cry – at least that is what I hope I hear because Ashanti was the worst, most wretched film I ever made. I knew it, but I was desperate, and I did it.”
While talking about the nightmarish production process, the actor added: “What is more, after a week of shooting in Kenya, I was sent back to England for two weeks while ‘changes’ were being made. These changes turned out to be the removal of the director, the leading lady, the art director and anybody else who was standing around at the time, or so it seemed. The picture was never properly released, although I was paid.”
Based on a novel by Alberto Vázquez-Figueroa, Ashanti features Caine as a doctor working for the World Health Organisation who gets caught up in the world of modern-day slave trading. It is a forgettable addition to Caine’s filmography that fails to do anything meaningful with a potentially interesting premise.
Watch the trailer below.
