DAY 504 | Michael Caine confirms retirement from acting

Michael Caine is Harry Palmer, the anti-James Bond spy, in Funeral in Berlin (1966)

"I keep saying I'm going to retire. Well I am now."

Sir Michael Caine has confirmed he has retired from acting, following the release of his latest film.

The 90-year-old screen legend stars in The Great Escaper opposite Glenda Jackson, who completed the film months before her death in June.

Sir Michael has previously indicated his intention to retire but has often been tempted back.

But he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "I keep saying I'm going to retire. Well I am now."

He added: "I've figured, I've had a picture where I've played the lead and had incredible reviews... What am I going to do that will beat this?"

Sir Michael said the likelihood of fewer parts being offered to him in old age has ultimately prompted his decision to retire.

"The only parts I'm liable to get now are 90-year-old men. Or maybe 85," he joked to presenter Martha Kearney.

"They're not going to be the lead. You don't have leading men at 90, you're going to have young handsome boys and girls. So I thought, I might as well leave with all this."

The actor is also due to publish a novel next month, a thriller titled Deadly Game.

Asked how he is finding old age, he replied: "I'm still grabbing every second even though I'm 90."

👉 Related content on IMDb (credits)

Source: BBC News, Steven McIntosh, October 14, 2023

Michael Caine in a scene from Funeral in Berlin, his second film
(following The IPCRESS File) as Cockney thief-turned-spy Harry Palmer.

Harry Palmer: The rebel spy who is the anti-James Bond

Michael Caine's role in the film version of Len Deighton's 1960s spy novel made him an icon. As a TV remake premieres [2022], Neil Armstrong looks at the creation of a unique secret agent.

In 2006, an ordinary-looking pair of spectacles went on sale at Christie's, the London auction house. They were expected to fetch up to £3,000 ($4,088). In fact, they sold for £6,600 ($8,994), and the buyer had bought a little piece of movie history.

Michael Caine is Harry Palmer in The Ipcress File (1965)

The spectacles were worn by Michael Caine when he played Harry Palmer in the 1965 espionage thriller The Ipcress File. Palmer, a former soldier, is introduced in a scene in which he is woken by his alarm clock, and reaches for his glasses before he gets out of bed. He's as blind as a bat without them – just one way in which he was not your typical action hero, certainly not back in the 60s.

In a nod to the movie, the very first shot of the new television adaptation of The Ipcress File shows Palmer's thick-rimmed spectacles. This time, Joe Cole (perhaps best known for his role in Peaky Blinders) plays the chippy working-class spy who loves culture, cooking and women but who doesn't have a lot of time for the posh public school boys who run British intelligence.

Like the film before it, the ITV series is based on the 1962 bestseller by the great spy novelist Len Deighton, which was published shortly after the cinema release of Dr No, the first instalment in the James Bond film franchise. Deighton's hero – unnamed in the novel but christened Harry Palmer for the screen – was quickly identified by critics and fans as being the anti-Bond.

James Watkins, director of the six-part adaptation, explains the differences between Ian Fleming's creation and Deighton's agent. "Bond is a superhero," he tells BBC Culture. "He kills without thinking or caring. He is establishment. He went to Eton. He uses his fists and his weapons more than his brain; gadgets, rather than real life.

"Harry is short sighted. Working class. Haunted by killing in Korea. A reluctant spy. Blackmailed into working for the establishment, insolent Harry is a constant thorn in their side. Trying to make his way in a world that is stacked against him. Always facing a class barrier. He's so much more relatable than the dinosaur Bond."

The makings of a genius thriller writer

Deighton, the London-born son of a chauffeur and a cook, wrote The Ipcress File, his first novel, on vacation in the Dordogne, France. It was, he writes in an afterword in the Penguin Modern Classics edition, a "holiday diversion". He was a commercial artist, trained at St Martin's School of Art and the Royal College of Art. He had worked for ad agencies and publishers, and knew Soho like the back of his hand. He had also seen a fair bit of the world, having completed two and a half years of national service with the RAF, and worked as a flight attendant with British Overseas Airways.

For The Ipcress File, he also reveals in the afterword, Deighton drew on his experiences at a smart ad agency where he had mixed with "highly educated, witty young men who had been at Eton together". He had actually enjoyed it, especially the barbed banter, and it informed his depiction of the intelligence service offices.

The complicated plot of Ipcress involves the brainwashing of British scientists by foreign powers but it was the tone, characterisation and sardonic style that impressed readers.

Spy novelist Jeremy Duns, a fan of both Bond and Palmer, says Deighton's espionage novels are "some of the greatest spy literature ever penned". There are at least four novels featuring the unnamed "Harry Palmer" (maybe more – the character's anonymity muddies the waters), and nine about the middle-aged Secret Intelligence Service officer Bernard Samson, as well as several standalone novels.

"I think the appeal of the [Harry Palmer] books and the films in the 60s was partly that the character was downbeat and relatively unglamorous, and made a contrast with the high fantasy of the Bond films," Duns tells BBC Culture. "I think Deighton was following in the footsteps of the Angry Young Men [writers of the 1950s], and you can see a lot of the same preoccupations, rebellion against authority being the most notable, but also these were 'kitchen sink' spy stories: you literally saw Michael Caine in the kitchen making an omelette (though his hands were, famously, Len Deighton's in that scene)."

From book to iconic film

In fact, though, several key members of the production team responsible for the Bond films also worked on Ipcress. Dr No's co-producer Harry Saltzman had approached Deighton to write the follow-up film, From Russia With Love. 

Deighton didn't work out as the 007 screenwriter but Saltzman decided to make The Ipcress File, with the express intention of providing an alternative view of espionage to that provided by Bond. 

John Barry, who scored many of the Bond films, composed the evocative Harry Palmer theme. Production designer Ken Adam, who won a Bafta for Ipcress, had a long association with the Bond franchise, making sets for seven films, from Dr No to Moonraker.

Richard Harris and Christopher Plummer reportedly passed on playing Palmer, and the part went to Michael Caine who had been a posh officer in his previous film, Zulu, and who had never before been the lead. He relished playing a role that was "more like the real me" and it made him a star.

Harry Palmer in Billion Dollar Brain (1967)

The film really hammered home the contrast with Bond that was already evident in the novel. Where 007 was all about globe-trotting glitz, Palmer operates in a drab and dreary post-war world, a world in which tinned "champignons" – he has a favourite brand – are about as glamorous as it gets. He regards the people he works for – who are also, supposedly, his social superiors – with derision. When one boss tells him he's being transferred, he wants to know if it will mean "any more money?". It's difficult to imagine Bond haggling with M over pay.

In our modern world where the social mobility promised in the 60s seems to have vanished, Harry is perhaps more relevant than ever: a true working-class hero

– James Watkins

Film critics were surprised by Palmer's spectacles. Wendy Michener in Maclean's magazine noted that he was "the only action-type hero I can think of" who wears them. "I can't recall remember another movie where the gal takes off the guy's glasses before seducing him," the Village Voice's reviewer, Andrew Sarris, wrote.

The fact that we see Palmer cooking was also considered radical. "Food fetishism," one critic called it. In a scene in which Palmer is preparing dinner for a beautiful colleague, pinned to the kitchen wall is one of the "cook strips" of illustrated recipes that Deighton produced for the Observer newspaper.

The film was subsequently included on a British Film Institute list of the best 100 British films of the 20th Century (although its two hastily-produced sequels, 1966's Funeral in Berlin and 1967's Billion Dollar Brain, didn't make the grade). And all of Deighton's novels were reissued as Penguin Modern Classics last year, with his espionage fiction now acknowledged as representing a high point of the genre. 

Until Harry Palmer wandered on to the scene, the traditions of the English spy novel were essentially upper-class ones, with John Buchan, Ian Fleming and John le Carré the masters of the genre. Deighton transformed this assumption."

His work has a wide appeal. Fans have included Lemmy, the hell-raising front man of rock band Motörhead, who said he never travelled without a Len Deighton novel, and the military historian Max Hastings, who calls Deighton's World War Two novel Bomber "probably the best thing ever written about the wartime air campaign against Germany".

Source: bbc.com/culture, Neil Armstrong, 18th February 2022

On a personal note:

One of my all-time favorite films featuring Michael Caine is 'Sleuth,' directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz in 1972. 

Milo Tindle and Andrew Wyke, Sleuth (1972)

This cinematic gem holds a very special place in history of the film industry due to a unique (as per my knowledge) casting twist.

In the original 1972 version, the role of Andrew Wyke was portrayed by Laurence Olivier, while Michael Caine took on the role of Milo Tindle, the unwitting victim of the sadistic mystery writer Andrew Wyke.

Fast forward to the 2007 remake directed by Kenneth Branagh, where a seasoned Michael Caine returned to the screen, this time playing the role of...  Andrew Wyke, the very character who tormented him in the 1972 classic. Jude Law stepped into the shoes of Milo in this reinterpretation.

The full film is (currently) available in English and LQ on YouTube free of charge.

*Click*

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