An unread script, a bad movie, and the shoot Michael Caine called “the best bloody time of my life”
Different actors go into the business for different reasons.
Sometimes, making great art is at the forefront of their minds, but other times, it’s money that gets the better of them. Maybe it’s just a job they’re good at. Perhaps it’s a chance to have a good time.
For Michael Caine, it has always been a mix of everything, as reflected in his starring in classics like Educating Rita and The Italian Job as well as money-grabbing disasters like Jaws: The Revenge. He certainly knows a good movie when he sees one, though, having spent years trying to make his way into the industry. It’s not that he has lazily fallen into it by luck, but it’s something that he has always really wanted. At the same time, however, he won’t hesitate to do a bit purely for fun.
It’s perhaps the fact that being a Hollywood star is so different to his working-class upbringing, which saw him take on various menial jobs, like working in a butter factory, before he broke through into the film industry, that propels him to take on jobs that allow him to have fun, and who wouldn’t.
He never thought he’d end up in a job that could take him across the world and win him awards, so when Caine was offered jobs that sounded like long holidays, he took them, which was the case when he accepted the role of John Deray in The Marseille Contract that allowed him to spend an extended period of time in the South of France. Having just become a father to his daughter Natasha, he seized the opportunity to take her somewhere warmer than rainy old England.
Talking to Time Out, he said, “It was just after my daughter was born, and to get her out of London in the winter into the South of France was wonderful. I never even read the script. I said, ‘I’ll fucking do this! I’m out of here!’”
So, without even an idea of the film he was making, he jetted over to a warmer climate and filmed the thriller alongside James Mason and Anthony Quinn, and while it didn’t become any of the actors’ most enduring work of the 1970s, Caine really couldn’t care less. It’s certainly a risk taking on a project that you haven’t read the script for, but judging by the actor’s questionable choice of roles over the years, it seems like he’s not always that fussy if it means having a job.
He admitted that he “had the best bloody time in my life”, describing how “we started off in Nice, went to Cannes, St Tropez and wound up in Paris”. Now, that sounds like a pretty ideal shooting schedule, made even more enjoyable by good company and the bubble of new fatherhood, no doubt.
The Marseille Contract is a little-remembered turn from Caine, made on a rather low budget, and while it didn’t exactly become a hit, at least he got a holiday out of it.
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