The fall and rise of Michael

As the great actor turns 90, Andrew Roberts salutes his long apprenticeship in forgotten B movies The fall and rise of Michael Caine

Sixty-five years ago, many cinemagoers wanted to avoid the supporting feature for the Danny Kaye vehicle Merry Andrew.

That supporting feature – Blind Spot (1958) – was standard B-film fare, with scenery costing approximately 5/6d. The only redeeming element was the lastminute revelation of the villain, nicely underplayed by a tall, fair-haired actor billed 13th in the opening credits.

It was the great Michael Caine, who will turn 90 on 14th March.

‘Michael Caine-spotting’ is a pastime familiar to those of us who appreciate British cinema of the 1950s and early 60s.

Caine did national service between 1952 and 1954, seeing active service in Korea. After he’d left the army, it was a long, hard slog before he hit the big time.

Before the release of Zulu in January 1964, he appeared in 16 films. In 1958 alone, Caine made six brief appearances, including as a Gestapo officer confronting Jack Hawkins in The Two-Headed Spy. A year later, he was a squaddie in a cinema commercial promoting Watney’s Ale.

Caine memorably describes this treadmill of bit-parts and temporary jobs in his autobiography The Elephant to Hollywood.

His one prominent cinema role of this era was as an inarticulate Irish labourer in the 1957 comedy How to Murder a Rich Uncle. Unfortunately, playing Gilrony required little more of him than looking woebegone and saying ‘Aye’ in a very strange accent.

Otherwise, he was making minor appearances, including as a matelot at the beginning of Sailor Beware (1956) – Paul Eddington was a shipmate – and again in The Bulldog Breed (1960), helping to rescue Norman Wisdom from Oliver Reed’s Teddy Boy gang.

Towards the end of the 1950s, there appeared to be a glimmer of hope of big roles – with the possibility of Caine’s joining Associate British Picture Corporation’s stable of contract artistes. But the casting director Robert Lennard told him, ‘I know this business well and believe me, Michael, you have no future in it.’

Caine was far from alone in having his talents ignored by British cinema. Peter Sellers was 30 when he starred in The Ladykillers (1955), and Ian Hendry didn’t achieve a major film role until he was 31.

Meanwhile, in 1961, the 28-year-old Caine cameoed as a police constable in the science-fiction drama The Day the Earth Caught Fire – ‘and I didn’t even manage that very well’.

Still, Caine’s stage and television CVs were expanding. He is one of the last prominent British film actors to emerge from provincial ‘rep’, starting his career in 1953 at Horsham under the name Michael Scott. The West Sussex County Times praised how ‘Mr Scott switches alarmingly from quiet charm to maniacal frenzy’ in the play Love From a Stranger (based on Agatha Christie’s short story Philomel Cottage). Another critic noted how the performance attracted ‘an idolising bevy of high-school beauty’ in the audience.

Shortly afterwards, the former Maurice Micklewhite adopted the

Slow burn: top, saluting in The Two-Headed Spy (1958); above, in The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961); right, in 1965; below, his big break in Zulu professional identity of Michael Caine, inspired by The Caine Mutiny (1954). Over the next few years, he would appear at Stratford East and in Birmingham in The Long and the Short and the Tall as Private Bamforth, alongside fellow cast member Terence Stamp. Television increasingly augmented Caine’s stage work, including a part as a Swiss prisoner in The Adventures of William Tell, wearing what looked like a tea cosy. His small screen roles gradually improved, and in 1961 he co-starred with Frank Finlay as a mentally disturbed occupant of The Compartment, a duologue written by Johnny Speight. The Stage applauded Caine’s ‘fascinating performance’, which is ‘missing, believed wiped’. The year 1961 saw him cast as the splendidly named Ray the Raver for Granada’s The Younger Generation series of dramas. In 1962, Caine appeared as an escaped mental-hospital inmate in Speight’s The Playmates and told a reporter, ‘That’s the end of Cockney nutty parts on TV for me.’ Towards the end of the year, Caine starred as Willie Mossop in an ITV adaptation of Hobson’s Choice. But the best cinema could offer him was a gangster role in Solo for Sparrow, one of

He is one of the last prominent British film actors to emerge from provincial rep

the Edgar Wallace Mysteries B-film series. The conclusion of this epic involves a low-budget gun battle, the arrival of a police Wolseley and a surprise guest appearance from a chicken.

Then 1963 proved Caine’s breakthrough year, with his West End debut in Next Time I’ll Sing to You and the title role in the BBC play The Way with Reggie. Dennis Potter regarded his performance as the ambitious docker as ‘beautiful’.

Although the Daily Telegraph’s reviewer was less keen, he referred to Caine as a ‘bright young actor’.

When Edna O’Brien interviewed him for the Evening Standard, he informed her that in Zulu ‘I play an aristocrat and I am proud of that. It means I’m not just a Cockney with a capital “C”.’

The days of uttering trite dialogue in second features now belonged to the past. Yet those cinemagoers who avoided Blind Spot missed an opportunity to see a star in the making.

Johnny Brent anticipated the insouciant charm of Harry Palmer in The Ipcress File (1965) and Lt Gonville Bromhead’s dulcet tones in Zulu. Caine modelled the slow speed of his accent on the Duke of Edinburgh. He’d noticed that grand people speak slowly because they know their audience will listen to them; while the less grand had to speak quickly before someone interrupted them.

And only an actor of Caine’s skill could make the threat ‘You haven’t been rash enough to inform the police, I hope’ and a getaway car that changes from a Vauxhall Victor to a pre-war Hillman remotely believable.