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    King of the Turkeys: Michael Caine in America
    King of the Turkeys: Michael Caine in America
    King of the Turkeys: Michael Caine in America
    Ebook60 pages1 hour

    King of the Turkeys: Michael Caine in America

    By Robert Cettl

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    About this ebook

    Michael Caine is acclaimed as a great actor. He is an international star and two-time Academy Award Winner (for Hannah and Her Sisters and The Cider House Rules) whose filmmaking career spans over fifty years and many nations. His classic films spring to mind immediately at the mention of his name - Alfie, The Italian Job, The Ipcress File, The Man Who Would be King, Get Carter, Hannah and her Sisters, Harry Brown. However, although Caine has immense standing as a serious actor, following his move to the USA in the 1970s he accepted work in terrible Hollywood films simply for the money or fringe benefits, occasionally as a favour to a friend.
    Some of these “turkeys” are worthy and earnest efforts. Some of them are irredeemable trash cinema. What is astonishing given the reverence accorded Caine is that these indifferent Hollywood flops, which impressed neither critics nor audiences, comprise the bulk of his career between 1972 and 1986: 14 years of Hollywood turkeys and the guy still gets an Academy Award. Two, actually.

    Indeed, no other internationally acclaimed actor has made as many terrible, indifferent or mediocre movies as Michael Caine. That is not to malign the actor only to point out that some of his career choices were often influenced by factors beyond the merits of the movie itself. To like Caine’s work, therefore, is to have a begrudging, proverbial “soft spot” for the flops and turkeys - redeemed often solely by Caine’s presence and, for which he always works hard - they are, if nothing else, money well earned. On close examination, some of these flops reveal considerable charms and interest: not perhaps enough to warrant a career retrospective of his American film work, but enough to reward discerning viewing (given the pre-emptive warning to lower expectations).

    This e-book celebrates Caine’s worst American movies, his turkeys, the stinkers that only his die-hard fans ether know about or can tolerate: and as is evident, he’s made more of them than most actors would care to remember or include on their CV. But not Caine - with characteristic humour he remembers every one (at least in some part - enough for a small anecdote anyway), its faults, missed opportunities, terrible critical receptions and all. This then is the warts and all e-book of Michael Caine’s American period, where he truly became the King of the Turkeys.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRobert Cettl
    Release dateJul 25, 2012
    ISBN9781476021041
    King of the Turkeys: Michael Caine in America
    Author

    Robert Cettl

    A freelance author and former Australian National Film & Sound Archive (NFSA) SAR Research Fellow, Robert Cettl (HBA, GCTESOL, GDIS, MTESOL) is an English lecturer at the University of Jinan, Shandong, China. Robert's non-fiction writing is published through McFarland & Co. Inc. and Bloomsbury Academic in the USA and collected by such as Yale University Library, the British Film Institute and the national libraries of Australia and China. He is also an experimental ethnographic filmmaker whose digital feature films are collected by the NFSA and soon to be released on Video-on-Demand and whose short videos about living and working in China can be found on his YouTube channel.

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      Book preview

      King of the Turkeys - Robert Cettl

      Introduction

      Michael Caine is acclaimed as a great actor. He is an international star and two-time Academy Award Winner (for Hannah and Her Sisters and The Cider House Rules) whose filmmaking career spans over fifty years and many nations. His classic films spring to mind immediately at the mention of his name - Alfie, The Italian Job, The Ipcress File, The Man Who Would be King, Get Carter, Hannah and her Sisters, Harry Brown. However, although Caine has immense standing as a serious actor, following his move to the USA in the 1970s he accepted work in terrible Hollywood films simply for the money or fringe benefits, occasionally as a favour to a friend.

      Some of these turkeys are worthy and earnest efforts. Some of them are irredeemable trash cinema. What is astonishing given the reverence accorded Caine is that these indifferent Hollywood flops, which impressed neither critics nor audiences, comprise the bulk of his career between 1972 and 1986: 14 years of Hollywood turkeys and the guy still gets an Academy Award. Two, actually.

      Indeed, no other internationally acclaimed actor has made as many terrible, indifferent or mediocre movies as Michael Caine. That is not to malign the actor only to point out that some of his career choices were often influenced by factors beyond the merits of the movie itself. To like Caine’s work, therefore, is to have a begrudging, proverbial soft spot for the flops and turkeys - redeemed often solely by Caine’s presence and, for which he always works hard - they are, if nothing else, money well earned. On close examination, some of these flops reveal considerable charms and interest: not perhaps enough to warrant a career retrospective of his American film work, but enough to reward discerning viewing (given the pre-emptive warning to lower expectations).

      This e-book celebrates Caine’s worst American movies, his turkeys, the stinkers that only his die-hard fans ether know about or can tolerate: and as is evident, he’s made more of them than most actors would care to remember or include on their CV. But not Caine - with characteristic humour he remembers every one (at least in some part - enough for a small anecdote anyway), its faults, missed opportunities, terrible critical receptions and all. This then is the warts and all e-book of Michael Caine’s American period, where he truly became the King of the Turkeys.

      Internationalism - Courting the American Directors: Hurry Sundown, Play Dirty, Too Late the Hero, Zee & Company, The Black Windmill, The Marseilles Contract

      Michael Caine’s direct flirtation with American cinema began after his stardom was well established in Britain with Zulu, The Ipcress File and Alfie, the latter casting him as an unrepentant Cockney womanizer and a role with which he would for a long time be identified, much to his chagrin. Caine thus first went to the USA as part of the publicity campaign for Alfie, while The Ipcress File was also screening there on general release. The process of cementing stardom began as Caine was interviewed by influential New York film critic Judith Crist on the Today show and on The Tonight Show as one of Johnny Carson’s first interviews (Caine, 1992, p. 401).

      Caine later commented that Gloria Steinem, in her contemporary interview for The New York Times confused him with his Alfie persona, something that led to later hostilities. Indeed, several years later Steinem would insult both Caine and his wife when she insinuated that Caine only liked submissive women and that in Shakira he had found one - Caine was incensed by this untrue accusation and lamented that much feminism by that time was hypocritical as it posited only specifically emancipated women as worthy of recognition and sought to implement and regulate how women defined themselves, their choices and their roles. But at this early point, all was well and Caine let the confusion over the Alfie persona slide.

      Superstar Shirley Maclaine was looking for a director for her new film, Gambit, when the name of Sidney J. Furie was suggested. When a screening of The Ipcress File was arranged for Maclaine and Furie proved unavailable, Maclaine exercised her contractual right to select the film’s male lead and chose Caine to be her co-star. Caine was back in England when he heard the news that Maclaine wanted him for Gambit. The actor eagerly agreed, later recounting that this was Hollywood, and I would have done anything to make a movie there (Caine, 2010, p. 281) and you see, at that time I had no sense of career moves or structure in my life; I was like a man just doing anything once that he had dreamed of before he died (Caine, 1992, p. 408). Caine thus got his first taste of Hollywood following a

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