The “vulgar and gratuitous” movie that made Michael Caine look like a creep: “I was stunned”
One of the most famous light bulbs that Michael Caine felt going off in his head came when he realised that he’d reached a stage in his career where leading man parts were going to be thin on the ground.
He’d been accustomed to being offered the main character, but after being asked to play the father of the protagonist and not the love interest of the female lead, he’d entered a new chapter, whether he was ready for it or not.
While the two-time Academy Award winner still found plenty of age-appropriate star turns and thrived under those circumstances in films like Harry Brown, Youth, and Is Anybody There?, his days of getting the girl were over. Of course, Hollywood has always had an uneasy relationship with age-appropriate couples onscreen, and Caine found himself at the centre of one of them as far back as the 1980s.
When Stanley Donen’s Blame It on Rio, a remake of the French comedy Un moment d’égarement, began principal photography on March 15th, 1983, the actor had turned 50 the day before. Hardly geriatric, but still queasy when the crux of the movie’s plot finds Caine’s Matthew Hollis beginning an affair with his friend’s teenage daughter, played by Michelle Johnson.
Johnson was only 17 when the cameras started rolling, playing a character who was 16, and required parental consent for the multiple instances in which she was either nude or filming love scenes with Caine, who was over 30 years her senior. He knew it was a risky thing to do, even by the lesser standards of the mid-80s, but his protestations to the director fell on deaf ears.
“Besides being beautiful, this girl had a stunning figure, and this is where we started to go wrong,” he wrote in his memoir, What’s It All About. “Because Stanley shot a lot of scenes of her topless, against my wishes. But Stanley shot on regardless, and what had seemed so innocuous on the topless beaches of St Tropez where the French film had been made now suddenly seemed vulgar and gratuitous in our film, and did us a lot of harm.”
Caine knew “it was a very risqué comedy” based on the premise alone, but there was a caveat: “Just how risqué it was we didn’t discover until it was released.” Demi Moore, who made one of her earliest big-screen outings in Blame It on Rio as the daughter of Caine’s character, would subsequently describe the picture as “a dirty old man’s fantasy,” and she wasn’t wrong.
The optics of a middle-aged man romancing his friend’s teenage daughter were questionable from the beginning, and when Donen insisted on shooting so many scenes of Johnson without her clothes, Caine had the sneaking suspicion that the film was on a hiding to nothing. As it turned out, he was right.
“When Blame It on Rio came out, it ran into a tremendous hammering, and even I was stunned by the vehemence of the critics,” he admitted. “After all, it was only topless. There was no full-frontal nudity at all, and in a picture that ran for two hours, there was less than four minutes of it.”
People weren’t offended by the nudity, but more by the fact that it was done by a 17-year-old, who was being romanced by a man almost three times her age. Continuing to dig himself a bigger hole and prove the critics right, Caine noted that “the most hysterical reviews came from female writers,” before he eventually “came to the conclusion that we would have fared better with the lady critics had Michelle Johnson’s breasts been uglier and smaller.” How progressive of him.
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