The Elephant to Hollywood - Michael Caine [153]
Regina (Audrey Hepburn): I already know a lot of people and until one of them dies I couldn’t possibly meet anyone else.
Peter (Cary Grant): Well, if anyone goes on the critical list, let me know . . .
And . . .
Regina: You know what’s wrong with you, don’t you?
Peter: No. What?
Regina: Nothing.
Brilliant, isn’t it?
3. On the Waterfront, 1954
This film was a revelation to me. The script by Budd Schulberg, the direction of Elia Kazan and the performances of the actors took me into a working-class reality in a way that I had never experienced in a movie before. Marlon Brando, Karl Malden, Rod Steiger and Eva Marie Saint were all Method Actors. There are two main principles: the first is that the rehearsal is the work and the performance the relaxation, so by the time you get to work in front of a camera you should be so familiar with what you are doing it seems effortless. The second principle is that your acting should come from sense memory, finding a moment in your own life to produce a real and instant emotion – I use it to this day, if I am required to cry. Not that I think of some great tragic incident, it’s just something that struck me as terribly sad. I’ve never told anyone – not even Shakira, to whom I am closer to than anyone else in the world – what that moment is. If I did, I would then be thinking of her reaction rather than my own and it would lose its power. The result in this film is quite extraordinary – especially in that iconic scene in which Marlon Brando as Terry and Rod Steiger as Charlie are in the back of the car and Terry says, ‘I coulda been a contender. I could have been somebody . . .’ Unforgettable.
2. The Third Man, 1949
Another Graham Greene novel – this time he adapted it for screen himself. And like all great movies, this has a fantastic sense of time and place. Post-war Vienna is an extraordinary setting for what I consider to be the best thriller ever. (Although films like Psycho, Rear Window, The Usual Suspects and Silence of the Lambs all run it as close seconds.) It was photographed in black and white by Robert Krasker with strange camera angles and a gritty documentary style and it has an unsettling and unforgettable sense of menace. The cast is fabulous – Joseph Cotton and Orson Welles in particular – the first time they had appeared together since Citizen Kane. The movie is full of so many memorable sequences it is hard to pull out just one, but perhaps I would point to the scene in which Harry Lime and Holly Martins are at the top of the giant Ferris wheel overlooking Vienna and Martins asks Harry if he has ever seen any of his victims . . . Harry brushes it off and after they get back down to the ground says to Holly as he’s walking away, ‘Like the fella says, in Italy for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love – they had five hundred years of democracy and peace and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. So long, Holly.’ Genius – and this line was written not by Graham Greene, but by Orson Welles himself. Then there’s the action climax and the chase through the sewers and the romantic climax where Joseph Cotton is waiting at the cemetery gates as Alida Valli is coming away from Harry Lime’s funeral. It’s a long walk towards him – will she stop? Or will she walk straight past? I’m not going to tell you. If you haven’t seen it, do yourself a favour and get a DVD right now!
1. Casablanca, 1942
Well – what else was it going to be? It should have been just another reasonably successful movie churned out by Hollywood. In fact, it probably shouldn’t have worked at all. It started shooting without a finished screenplay, from