The “hard, seedy, gritty” movie that saw Michael Caine channel his inner Clint Eastwood
When John Wayne movies started to feel a little outdated, a symbol of an old version of America, Clint Eastwood came along.
His appearance in Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns, more violent and gritty than the genre was used to, changed cinema and showed that Eastwood could play the ultimate anti-hero. Viewers wanted to be Eastwood or be with him, his smouldering looks making everything he did, no matter if he was wielding a gun or getting into fights, look effortlessly cool. By the 1970s, though, he began to focus his attention on directing, but he still found time to star in projects offered to him by others, like the classic crime movie Dirty Harry.
Playing the ever-so-slightly crooked cop who won’t let anything stop him from getting his job done, the role became a defining moment in his career, which cast him as a flawed but mesmerising anti-hero. Meanwhile, across the pond, Britain’s answer to Eastwood had arguably come in the form of Michael Caine, with a penchant for Cockney gangster roles that you couldn’t help but love.
Before Eastwood was the star of Dirty Harry, Caine was an iconic anti-hero of the silver screen, playing Harry Palmer in 1965’s The Ipcress File, reprising the role of the spy in Funeral in Berlin and Billion Dollar Brain. While the former was riding horses and engaging in shootouts, Caine was establishing himself as the premium screen gangster, continuing this into the following decade with 1971’s Get Carter.
Soon, the British star ascended the ranks of Hollywood, temporarily stepping away from British cinema to appear in the likes of Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill, Stanley Donen’s Blame It on Rio, Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters (which he won an Oscar for), and, of course, the terrible Jaws: The Revenge. Shedding the British anti-hero role he had become so well-known for, Caine was able to expand his repertoire, even playing Scrooge in The Muppet Christmas Carol.
He has never forgotten his roots in British cinema, though, with roles in the likes of Educating Rita and Mona Lisa during the ‘80s reflecting his love of working close to home. By the ‘90s, he decided to use his experience of Hollywood to help the production of more large-scale British movies, an industry that had sagged under the weight of American cinema’s dominance in the ‘80s.
Forming M&M Productions with Martin Bregman and HBO contributing to funding, he made the movie Blue Ice, released in 1992, which was Caine’s attempt to get back to the glory of his grittier gangster and spy movie days, while taking inspiration from the great success of Eastwood’s action-filled Dirty Harry.
Talking to Empire, the actor explained, “HBO knew that Marty was a friend of mine, and they said to him, ‘You know what we’d like to see? Michael Caine with a gun in his hand again, and a woman in the other arm’. That was the whole premise. So we bought these really hard, seedy, gritty detective books and made an incredible, tough film, all action. This is a bit of a Dirty Harry Palmer.”
Blue Ice saw Caine play a spy, but it didn’t really make much of an impact, grossing just $350,000 in the UK and failing to even hit the US market. It wasn’t exactly The Ipcress File, and it wasn’t Dirty Harry, either, yet Caine didn’t need to try to make a Dirty Harry-esque character; he’d already become an iconic anti-hero before Don Siegel’s film was even released.
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