Granta, the “magazine of new writing”, publishes in its latest edition extracts from the diary of John Fowles, in which he writes about the making of movies from his novels. In a piece of the diary from 1967, Fowles writes about visiting the set of The Magus and meeting Michael Caine, who starred in it opposite Anthony Quinn. Caine was then in the first flush of his fame, having made the successful thriller The Ipcress File and the lighter romance Alfie, and Fowles was impressed, as he records, by Caine’s “presence” and his “matter-of-factness”.
When Fowles saw the film, he pronounced Caine bad, and the film bad, and that was perhaps because Caine’s matter-of-factness didn’t play well in the overheated atmosphere of The Magus. But Fowles had pinpointed something that makes Caine’s great performances great, whether charmingly, as in Alfie (1966), or chillingly so, as in the British gangster classic Get Carter (1971), or as the ordinary adulterer taking himself by surprise in Woody Allen’s wonderful Hannah and Her Sisters (1986). His more recent films, The Quiet American and The Statement, use this quality in Caine to powerful effect.
Together with those two movies, this week’s Caine performance in The Actors provides a neat compendium of his mature talents. It’s good to see him in a comedy, and a relatively broad one at that. He’s even capable, as The Actors shows, of playing over-the-topness with a certain anchoring matter-of-factness.
Caine plays the lead performer in one of those repertory troupes that travel around the United Kingdom doing Shakespeare plays in town halls. We see him hamming it up in a production of Richard III that surely takes off from Ian McKellen’s Nazi-styled version of a few years ago; here, hampered as it is by stage mishaps and odd scenery, never mind the endless Nazi salutes, the production is made to seem absurd.
As is the character Caine plays. This faded but still histrionic actor struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and carries on strutting and fretting off it, too. His personality is a marvellous, twitching mixture of egotism and insecurity, the combination of which leads him to concoct a scam to defraud some local gangsters. For this hare-brained scheme he enlists the help of a junior actor played by Dylan Moran, providing a nice foil for Caine. Naturally, in the course of this caper, things go horribly (and hilariously) wrong.
The Actors is a slight movie, a good-natured, wry comedy above all else, and one doesn’t want to overstate its virtues, but it is a great deal of fun. The fun, moreover, is of a different order to American mainstream plot-driven and gag-based humour: it arises out of the characters, most importantly that brought to life by Caine. It’s also his first chance to get into drag since Dressed to Kill — as a matter of fact.