“A lovely little film”: the 1990 movie Michael Caine regrets getting “lost in the system”
Any actor with over 150 credits is going to star in a few movies that slip through the cracks, and when Michael Caine admitted that he hasn’t seen all of his own films, what chance does anyone else have?
It would take the ultimate completionist to dig out everything from 1950’s Morning Departure to 2023’s The Great Escaper, and while that’s not to say it can’t or hasn’t already been done, a legend of Caine’s stature will inevitably have a few features they consider unsung gems that went too far under the radar.
As a two-time Academy Award winner with plum roles in a slew of stone-cold classics, cult favourites, and box office hits, cinema’s greatest-ever cockney export is aware that it would take one hell of an effort to see everything that he’s done, especially when some of his efforts were quickly swept under the rug.
The period between the late 1980s and early 1990s was a strange one for Caine. After his Oscar-winning turn in Hannah and Her Sisters, he was all over the shop. Jaws: The Revenge, Surrender, Mr Destiny, Noises Off, and Bullseye were bombing left, right, and centre, with the star ready to quit the business altogether before Jack Nicholson kept him away from retirement with Blood and Wine.
Sandwiched in the middle was director Jan Egleson’s blackly comedic caper, A Shock to the System, which saw Caine starring as an ageing advertising executive who discovers that the easiest way to achieve the career progression he’d missed out on thus far is to murder the competition. It was his best performance in years, in his best-reviewed release for years, but barely anyone saw it.
“That was a lovely little film, but it was too small for its own good, really,” Caine reflected. “It got lost. It was the sort of film, were it made today, that would be great as a film for HBO, or something. But at the same time, it just got lost in the system.” Despite giving him a performative platform the likes of which he hadn’t seen since the ’80s, the film couldn’t even crack $3.5 million at the box office.
Caine hasn’t yet entered his made-for-television era, which was ironically something he regretted doing when he reprised the role of Harry Palmer in Bullet to Beijing and Midnight in St Petersburg in 1995 and 1996, respectively, but he still believed that A Shock to the System would have gotten a fairer shake of the stick if it had been an HBO original, as opposed to a dead-in-the-water theatrical release.
It didn’t help that his star power was seriously on the wane at the time, either, with that aforementioned string of bombs conspiring to convince many people, including Caine himself, that he was in danger of becoming yesterday’s man and a relic of a bygone age who didn’t have a place in modern cinema.
Of course, since his career rebounded and carried on for another 30-odd years after that, he got the last laugh, and if you were to ask him which of his pictures could be called the most unsung, he’d clearly have A Shock to the System somewhere high on that list.
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