A film and television fixture for decades, Michael Caine is one of Hollywood’s best and brightest (he’s earned an Oscar nomination at least once a decade since the 1960s), with an incredible list of credits as a leading man and a supporting player — and even a few minor roles, like his brief appearance in 2006’s Children of Men. As if that wasn’t impressive enough, Caine’s also a published author, a chillout DJ, and a knight of the Order of the British Empire — and now, thanks to the debut of his latest film, Youth, he can add “subject of a Rotten Tomatoes Total Recall” to his list of accomplishments. Let’s take a look at Michael Caine’s definitive roles!
Caine scored his first starring role in this Cy Endfield production, which told the story of the Battle of Rorke’s Drift during the late 19th century Anglo-Zulu War. The culmination of a long and bitter border dispute, the war ultimately added another bloody chapter to British colonialism in the region, but not without months of the kind of struggle dramatized in Zulu — and the efforts of soldiers like lieutenants John Chard (played by Stanley Baker, who also produced) and Gonville Bromhead (played by Caine), who threw together a makeshift fort to make a desperate stand against the opposition. Though barely a footnote in American history books, Rorke’s Drift produced a number of decorated veterans for the British Army — and an early critical triumph for its freshly minted star. “Caine was just splendid,” applauded Dennis Schwartz of Ozus’ World Movie Reviews. “It is still one of his finest hours in film.”
Caine made his first — and, critically speaking, his best — appearance as Len Deighton’s rumpled spy Harry Palmer in this 1965 thriller, which gave fans of cinematic espionage a slightly more realistic alternative to James Bond. Emphasis on the slightly: Although Harry had to contend with more bureaucratic red tape (and got to play with fewer gadgets) than 007, his adventures still included a few of the fanciful elements that make a good spy yarn, like The Ipcress File‘s high-tech tape recordings and brainwashing baddies. Caine went on to play Palmer in two sequels and a pair of made-for-TV movies, but Ipcress was the one that helped him break out as a leading man: As Angie Errigo of Empire noted, “Caine, Zulu under his belt and Alfie ahead, is the cheeky working class but aspirational bright spark hero par excellence, captured at the exact moment he became a star.”
The quintessential swinging ’60s film, Alfie is undeniably a product of its time, and it can admittedly be hard to watch it in 2015 without thinking of Austin Powers or wincing at the dated lingo and/or fashions. But this adaptation of the Bill Naughton novel remains a classic for many reasons, chief among them Michael Caine’s impressively nuanced, Oscar-nominated performance in the title role. Alfie Elkins is a cad, plain and simple, but Caine made audiences root for him anyway by giving them glimpses of his humanity — and not only in the few scenes where he was called upon to show some real emotion, but throughout the entire film, as he slowly, subtly took the character on a journey from callow bachelor to… well, less callow bachelor. As Dan Lybarger put it in his review for Nitrate Online, “Caine’s terrific performance makes a viewer almost forget that the film is actually a condemnation of its character’s swinging lifestyle.”
A stark, unflinching portrait of the lingering stain that violence can leave on a person’s life — even after they’re dead — Get Carter repulsed many critics when it was released, but behind all that ugly violence lurks a film whose sharp script, strong performances, and surprisingly thoughtful themes are impossible to ignore. The critics eventually came around, too; over time, Carter has come to be regarded as one of the best gangster movies ever made — and even one of Britain’s best films overall. In another actor’s hands, the role of the vengeful Jack Carter would have been a thuggish cartoon, but Caine infused his character’s homicidal rampage with palpable pain and sorrow. (For an example of how it could have gone wrong, watch Sylvester Stallone’s 2000 remake, which featured Caine in a supporting role. Or better yet, don’t.) He’d earned praise for earlier roles, but Caine really started coming into his own here; as Roger Ebert noted in his review, “Caine has been mucking about in a series of potboilers, undermining his acting reputation along the way, but Get Carter shows him as sure, fine and vicious — a good hero for an action movie.”
Caine went toe to toe with Laurence Olivier in this adaptation of the Anthony Shaffer play, directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz (All About Eve). A seriously impressive pedigree, and it paid off on the screen: Caine and Olivier were the only credited actors in the movie, and Sleuth earned them both Best Actor nominations — something that had, to that point, happened only once before (the first? Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf). As with a lot of stage adaptations, Sleuth is extremely dialogue-heavy, but with actors this talented, that helps; over the course of its two hours-plus running time, the complicated rivalry between nobleman Andrew Wyke (Olivier) and struggling businessman Milo Tindle (Caine) deepens with every line. It’s such a rich story, Caine actually took Olivier’s role for Kenneth Branagh’s 2007 remake, starring opposite Jude Law. “It’s one of those works built around a gimmick that in fact requires a little cheating on the part of the filmmakers in order to succeed,” wrote Ken Hanke of the Asheville Mountain Xpress. “But it’s a good gimmick.”
John Huston waited more than 20 years to finish this adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s short story about a pair of adventurers and their exploits in a remote Afghan village, trying to cast a succession of rugged duos (from Bogey and Clark Gable to Robert Redford and Paul Newman) before finally finding his leading men in Caine and Sean Connery. Blending anti-imperialist themes with swashbuckling escapism, The Man Who Would Be King charts the rise and fall of Peachy Carnehan (Caine) and Danny Dravot (Connery) as they dupe an Afghan village into thinking they’re gods, only to find that the natives aren’t quite as credulous as they seem. It was, in short, a slice of good old-fashioned adventure during a time when it had fallen out of favor — making King, in the words of Cole Smithey, “A must for every 10-year-old boy.”
Woody Allen lined up one of his strongest ensemble casts for the seven-time Academy Award nominee Hannah and Her Sisters, starring Caine as Elliot, the restless husband of Hannah (Mia Farrow) whose dissatisfaction with his marriage leads him into an entanglement with — you guessed it — Hannah’s sister (Barbara Hershey). It’s the kind of story Allen tells best, and Hannah is one of his strongest — and most successful — films, ultimately winning a Best Writing Oscar to go with its healthy $40 million gross. “No matter how passive a viewer you are, how much you attempt to dismiss it or judge its characters,” wrote Steven Snyder for Zertinet Movies, “Woody Allen reaches past those sleepy, cynical, or questioning eyes and makes you think as much as any film I’ve seen.”
Writer/director Neil Jordan scored one of his earliest critical hits with 1986’s Mona Lisa, starring Bob Hoskins as George, an ex-con who is manipulated by his former boss, a gangster named Mortwell (Caine), into a relationship with a prostitute (Cicely Tyson) so Mortwell can take advantage of her “professional” connection to a rival. Caine is in singularly sleazy form here, but it was Hoskins, in a rare starring role, who walked away with a pile of trophies, including a Golden Globe, a BAFTA Award, and an Oscar nomination. Part love story, part grisly mobster drama, Mona Lisa didn’t make a ton of money at the box office, but it did earn the admiration of critics like ReelViews’ James Berardinelli, who wrote, “In an era when movies about love almost always invariably devolve into formulaic affairs, Neil Jordan’s Mona Lisa stands out as an often-surprising, multi-layered achievement.”
The first time Hollywood took a crack at adapting Graham Greene’s bestselling novel, the result was a bowdlerized version that, much to his chagrin, stripped out the author’s distaste with American involvement in Vietnam. More than 40 years later, director Phillip Noyce filmed a much more faithful adaptation, starring Brendan Fraser as an idealistic CIA operative in 1950s Vietnam, Michael Caine as the jaded British journalist who crosses his path, and Do Thi Hai Yen as the woman who comes between them. What Noyce’s version lost in timeliness, it more than made up in script and cast — most notably Caine, who earned a Best Actor Academy Award nomination for his work and was singled out in reviews from critics such as Eleanor Ringel Gillespie of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “Caine, who also starred in one other Greene adaptation, 1983’s The Honorary Consul, is the essence of almost all the author’s misfits, ” wrote Gillespie, summing him up as “a practiced cynic masking an aching romantic.”
Bruce Wayne might be an unimaginably wealthy businessman who lives a double life as the crime-purging vigilante Batman, but he wouldn’t be able to get much done without the dependable service of his long-suffering butler, Alfred Pennyworth — and when Christopher Nolan took over the franchise with 2005’s Batman Begins, he turned to Caine to embody the character with his unique ability to project an aura of good breeding, street smarts, and a quick, understated wit. Though not one of Caine’s larger roles, Alfred is an integral part of the Batman mythos, and his part in the franchise placed him alongside talented actors such as Christian Bale, Morgan Freeman, and Heath Ledger — whose bravura performance as the Joker in The Dark Knight was a crucial element in the positive reviews the movie earned from critics like Manohla Dargis of the New York Times, who wrote, “Pitched at the divide between art and industry, poetry and entertainment, The Dark Knight goes darker and deeper than any Hollywood movie of its comic-book kind.”
