Michael Caine - The Elephant to Hollywood

So from a high-octane celebrity party to a small dinner with old friends and then – and happiest of all – to a day at home with three generations of my family – I have had a birthday I’ll always remember. It seems to me, too, as I sit here finishing this book, that my three birthday celebrations also reflect the distance I’ve travelled – from the Elephant all the way to Hollywood and back. It was a tough start, it’s had some low moments and it’s had incredible highs, but it’s been a rich and rewarding journey – and it’s not over yet!

All my life I have been an avid movie fan, which is why, I suppose, I ended up in the business. I love movies – I can even find something to like in the bad ones – but I do have an all-time Top Ten. Here they are in reverse order…

10. Tell No One, 2006

This is a French film and one of the best thrillers I have ever seen. It’s adapted from the brilliant novel by American thriller writer Harlan Coben – who actually appears in the film as the man who follows our hero, Bruno, into the station – and I’ve always been a bit surprised that it wasn’t bought by an American studio. Bruno is played by François Cluzet, who gives it a slight American feel as he looks very like Dustin Hoffman, and the great English turned French actress, Kristin Scott Thomas, co-stars. The blurb alone is enough to draw you in: ‘A husband and wife, out together, are badly beaten by a person unknown. The husband survives, but the wife dies. The wife’s father identifies her body and they bury her. Seven years later, the husband gets an email from his dead wife saying, “Meet me in the park in an hour.”’ I couldn’t resist – the film is stunning.

9. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, 1948

This is a movie involving two of my favourite artists: Humphrey Bogart, whom I never got to meet, and John Huston, who directed me in two of my favourite films, The Man Who Would Be King and Escape to Victory . As I’ve said before, I’ve always thought that if God spoke he would sound like John Huston, a deep voice of experience and wisdom and in this film you can actually hear John’s voice. He plays a man who keeps getting hit on by Bogart’s character, who is begging in the street, and John gives him a lecture. I’d listen to a lecture from John Huston any day – his voice is completely mesmerising. I first saw when it came out – and I felt it was a metaphor for my own life. It features a load of dumb sods searching for a treasure; and there I was, a dumb sod searching for my own treasure – only in my case, that was a career in the movies. The crazy old man, played by Walter Huston, knows where the treasure is – and fortunately for me, as I went through my life I met my own Walter Hustons. There is a great scene in the movie when Bogart says, ‘We’re never going to find the gold’ and Huston starts to laugh and he does this little skip and dance, saying, ‘You’re so dumb, you don’t even see the riches you’re treadin’ on with your own feet…’ and Bogart and Tim Holt look mystified and then they look down and they are standing on it…

8. Gone with the Wind, 1939

This was the first movie in colour to win a Best Picture Oscar and, taking inflation into account, it is still the highest grossing picture ever. The book, by Margaret Mitchell, was turned down by every major Hollywood studio and picked up in the end by the independent producer David O. Selznick. Selznick was a genius at doing movies on the cheap. Apart from using the front door of his own studio as the front door to Tara, he saved money at both ends in the scene of the burning of Atlanta by setting fire to several old sets he wanted to get rid of on the back lot. The first director on the movie was a brilliant, gentle and very sensitive man called George Cukor, and although Selznick fired him and replaced him with Victor Fleming, a brusque, tough, action director, neither Vivien Leigh nor Olivia de Havilland liked the change and continued to seek private direction from Cukor. This was also the film in which Clark Gable said ‘Damn’. It had, of course, been said in a film before, but it caused controversy because Gone with the Wind was so big… I can watch this movie time and time again without tiring of it. It is a timeless classic.

7. All That Jazz, 1979

This is my favourite musical and Bob Fosse, who directed and choreographed it, is my favourite choreographer – he also directed two of my other favourite musicals, Cabaret , which won eight Oscars, including one for Bob for Best Director, and Sweet Charity , which had my friend and mentor Shirley Maclaine dancing up a storm and featured a great number by Sammy Davis Junior, ‘The Rhythm of Life’. But it is the music and dancing in All That Jazz that makes it stand out for me – that, plus the performance of Roy Schneider in the lead. When I was an out-of-work actor I had worked as a stage hand on Bob Fosse’s stage production of The Pajama Game , but I didn’t get to know him personally until he and I and several other actors danced with the Rockettes’ chorus line at Radio City Music Hall in 1985. We were lined up in alphabetical order and I was next to Charles Bronson – who turned out to be an unexpectedly great chorus dancer. We were down one end with the slightly older chorus ladies, who were known as the Dirty Dozen. A bit further down the line, Rock Hudson got the younger fresher ones – which was a bit of a waste, come to think of it.

6. The Maltese Falcon, 1941

This was the first gangster thriller I ever saw, and the first film John Huston ever directed. It was also the first of a series of three films that the then big star George Raft turned down, which consequently turned Humphrey Bogart into an icon. Bogart is fantastic, of course, but he’s backed up by an equally strong cast including Sidney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre. I fell in love with Dashiell Hammett’s dialogue and started to read his books whenever I could run them to earth in Fifties London. In fact Hammett wrote my favourite thriller line ever: ‘It was dark – and it wasn’t just the night.’ The Maltese Falcon was the start of my love affair with film noir – which continues to this day.

5. Some Like It Hot, 1959

This remains one of the funniest films I have ever seen – and the most daring comedy. I had never seen a film where the stars dressed in drag; in the Fifties it was unheard of. Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis took a real chance with this and with the help of Billy Wilder and his script and the inspired casting of Marilyn Monroe, they made it an all-time great comedy. Many years later I was very close friends with both Irving Lazar and Billy Wilder and Irving told me he was with Billy when he showed the film to the critics for the first time and there was not a laugh during the entire film. After the show they went to Hamburger Hamlet and tough, unsentimental Billy burst into tears. He should have remembered the old theatre adage: ‘a paper [complementary] house never laughs’. I was having dinner with Billy one night and I asked him if Marilyn Monroe had been difficult to work with and he said that she had been. ‘She was always late,’ he said, ‘and she didn’t know her lines. But then,’ he went on, ‘I could have cast my Aunt Martha, and she would have been on time and she would have known her lines, but who the hell would have gone to see her?’ A typical Billy Wilder comment…

4. Charade, 1963

This is my favourite romantic movie of all time – it is also a great comedy and a great thriller and of course it is set in one of my favourite cities in the world, Paris. It’s also, in my view, one of the most underrated movies of all time. The film has a great sense of nostalgia for me as they shot a whole sequence in Les Halles, the old food market where we all used to go in the Sixties at two o’clock in the morning after all the nightclubs closed, to have French onion soup. The relationship between Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn is of course the main attraction of the film: they were superb. It’s full of brilliant one-liners and these two actors deliver them immaculately. Here are two of my favourites: