The “piece of junk” movie that lured Michael Caine to Hollywood: “You get sucked in”
Getting nominated for an Oscar is the pinnacle of any actor’s career.
Now imagine getting nominated for multiple Oscars, across multiple decades. If you’re Michael Caine, then you don’t need to imagine because the iconic Brit has six Oscar nods to his name, with the first coming in 1966, while the most recent was in 2002, and that means he is one of a few stars to have received a nomination in five different decades – a truly remarkable feat.
Of course, none of this acclaim was guaranteed. There was no obvious route for a working-class London boy to make it to the very top, with Caine very much blazing a trail. As he explained to Deseret News in 2005, his main concern when he first made it big was paying off his debts. Once he’d gotten himself in the clear, however, he was completely blown away by the glitz and glamour of Tinseltown.
“[You] sort of make a hit picture, you get nominated for an Academy Award, and you get sucked in,” Caine explained. “’America wants me, you’re a British actor – geez, Hollywood!’ Then, some big Hollywood producer rings you. The first one was Otto Preminger.”
Born in Austria, Preminger emigrated to the US in the 1930s, and it didn’t take long for him to make a name for himself as one of the great filmmakers of his day. He first reached the upper echelons with Laura, the story of a young woman’s murder and the circumstances that led to it. He is perhaps best known for making 1959’s Anatomy of a Murder, widely described as one of the greatest courtroom dramas of all time.
Unfortunately for Caine, he didn’t get to star in anything nearly as good as those two examples. “I wound up making Hurry Sundown,” he continued. “Which was a piece of junk.” Released in 1967, the film depicts Caine as a nasty Southerner who has married into wealth. He plans to further his fortune by buying a plum plot of land, only for his plan to spiral wildly out of control.
As Caine alluded to, Hurry Sundown was not very well received. Critics felt that it was wildly out of touch, depicting the South as several decades behind where it was. Stereotypes applied to women and people of colour were deemed inappropriate and offensive, while on a more basic level, the story just wasn’t up to snuff. Did Caine mind, though? Not at all.
Even though he’s slagged it off publicly many times, Caine is ultimately grateful for what Hurry Sundown brought him. “He was one of the greatest directors,” he said of Preminger. “It was Hollywood.” As we all know, his Hollywood journey didn’t end there. The Italian Job wasn’t far away, which confirmed his status as a leading man.
More opportunities across the pond followed, like The Man Who Be King and California Suite, and Caine would eventually become one of the biggest stars on either side of the Atlantic. It all worked fine… eventually.
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