The 1988 movie Michael Caine is desperate to be rediscovered: “My favourite one”
There’s probably a balance to strike once you get to the ripe old age of 93, like Michael Caine has, which is either to try to leave the world in a better place for those younger than you to inhabit, or just to think ‘fuck it’ and do whatever you like to make as much money as you can while you’re still around.
Sadly, it appears Caine has chosen the latter and has licensed his voice to be used by AI to read an audiobook of The Odyssey, the 3,000-year-old epic poem by Homer, which was released this week after he signed a deal with a company called Elevenlabs to feature as one of their computer-generated ‘iconic voices’ for people to hire.
Which is immensely disappointing, because AI is boring and utter shite and will do nothing but accelerate joblessness and engender a complete lack of creative effort just so some tech bros in California can live in walled-off complexes and hire private security to pick off anyone desperate enough to approach their house with a bowl hoping for some food to be thrown away.
Caine doesn’t have to care about that, though, because he’ll be dead, so he can merrily sign away his own voice for crying out loud in order to rinse every penny he can, including making the most out of Christopher Nolan releasing his IMAX-filmed version of The Odyssey in cinemas next month.
Ironically, he is a long-time collaborator of Nolan’s, appearing in no less than eight of his movies, including Inception, Interstellar and The Dark Knight, which are probably the best three, let’s face it. But he isn’t in The Odyssey, because he’s actually genuinely too old now, and mostly uses a wheelchair, which isn’t conducive to battling Trojan soldiers or 50 foot-high cyclopses.
But worry not, because if you do want to see Caine do what he does best there are of course tens of examples of excellent films he made over a seven-decade career, from the incomparable The Italian Job and The Ipcress File in the 1960s, to the fantastically grim Get Carter in 1971 to The Man Who Would be King with Sean Connery in 1975, to 1986’s Hannah and her Sisters, to the brilliant, dystopian Children of Men in 2006.
Ask the man himself which of his films he would like to see return to the cinemas, however, and he doesn’t pick any of those. He told Esquire: “Well that would be (1966 lad-about-town comedy) Alfie. But a more recent one, my favorite one, is Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. It’s the funniest movie I ever did and the happiest movie to make. We shot on the French Riviera, where it was set, which is one of my favourite places in the world, and they rented a villa for me in the summer.”
Released in 1988, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels was a stylish two-hander with Caine and Steve Martin playing a pair of con men who are competing to swindle a wealthy tourist out of fifty grand. Directed by Miss Piggy himself, Frank Oz, it was a box office hit that was originally envisaged as a vehicle for David Bowie and Mick Jagger, which tells you everything about that decade that you need to know.
Production does indeed seem to have basically been a glorified jolly for all involved, with locations including Antibes, Cannes, Nice and an enormous villa in the south of France owned by a member of the Rothschild banking family, with it being no surprise at all that they finished six days ahead of schedule so they could all just lie around the place.
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