The one movie Michael Caine will always regret making: “One of the worst pictures I made”
With well over 150 credits to his name, Michael Caine has never been one to turn down roles that come his way, something he’s repeatedly admitted to in the past. The actor has found himself more than comfortable accepting some of the less salubrious roles that have been thrown his way as long as those movies come complete with a hefty paycheque. We may dream of our actors being in it only for the art, but the truth is, fame and fortune play their part, and Caine has never been frightened to admit it.
As such, Caine’s career, though littered with magnificent triumphs and game-changing roles, is also cluttered with some of the biggest clangers around. Caine, though, has never associated himself form the missteps he made artistically. That being said, it takes a special kind of terrible for the legendary actor to openly brand something as a career regret.
His comments on Jaws: The Revenge are arguably more famous than the film itself, but that wasn’t even the first time Caine had lent his immense talents to a horrendous horror movie that pitted man against nature in what turned out to be a race straight to the bottom of the barrel.
On first glance, the cast of 1978’s The Swarm reads as if it could have been lifted from a prestige drama as opposed to a schlocky B-movie, with Caine being joined by Academy Award nominees, including The Graduate‘s Katharine Ross, Richard Widmark, and Lee Grant, in addition to Oscar winners and icons like Olivia de Havilland, Henry Fonda, Ben Johnson, José Ferrer, and Patty Duke.
That’s a ludicrously stacked roster for an equally ludicrous story that finds scientists and the army banding together in an effort to thwart an army of deadly killer bees threatening to decimate the population. Seeking to capitalise on the disaster boom of the decade that had birthed The Poseidon Adventure, The Towering Inferno, and Earthquake, to name but three, The Swarm ended up falling flat on its face.
A box office calamity that was reviled by critics, it’s now a regular point of conversation whenever the topic turns towards the worst films ever made. To be in contention for such a title is impressive in itself, but to be thought by caine as one of the movies that brings him actual shame is about as damning an indictment as you can get.
When asked by Time Out if there were any projects from his career that he regretted turning down, Caine was quick off the mark: “I never turned anything down,” he said. “There were quite a few movies I regretted. One of the worst pictures I made was The Swarm.”
Understandably, he was enticed to sign on by the calibre of the ensemble, with “all these big Hollywood stars” helping to teach the stage veteran the differences between treading the boards and performing within the context of cinema. In a way, it was worth it, then, but Caine still retained one memory that turned out to be a sign of things to come.
During the shooting of one scene, he noticed “the bees were shitting on us” before remarking that “the first review was in, but we didn’t know it at the time.” An A-list cast in a Z-list abomination it may have been, but Caine did at least manage to pick up several new tools of the trade during The Swarm, having credited de Havilland and Fonda in particular for showing him the ropes for “how to act on film”.
Michael Caine’s career is set in stone. He will be forever thought of as one of the greats of Hollywood, one of the first British exports to truly crack America and an icon of several eras. For this, and this alone, he will be most fondly remembered. But perhaps one of the movies that sticks out the most for the man himself is the one he has spent his life regretting.
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