The Elephant to Hollywood - Michael Caine [59]
It wasn’t long, though, before another picture came along and this one, I’m happy to say, was nothing but a pleasure from beginning to end – and a successful pleasure, too. I’ve always taken the view that you get paid as much for a bad film as you do for a good one, but I’m only too aware that you need to keep the proportion of good films to bad high enough to avoid the stink of failure and to maintain your credibility at the box office. The Italian Job – that script I had mentioned to Charles Blühdorn the day after he bought Paramount – satisfied on all fronts.
We started on location in London and for me one of the greatest pleasures of the film was working with Noël Coward. The director of the film, Peter Collinson, had grown up in an orphanage sponsored by Coward – he still called him ‘Master Coward’, just like a schoolboy – and he had persuaded Coward to take on the unlikely role of the underworld boss who masterminds the entire heist from inside prison. It may have been an unlikely role, but Noël played it to perfection: being an old queen, he loved taking on the role of a gangster boss with all these tough guys under his command. He was gloriously unfussy and unstuffy about the whole thing and mucked in with everybody: it was a fantastic opportunity for me to learn from the master of comic timing. He was a generous, amusing and lovable man and every Wednesday while we were shooting in London we had dinner together at the Savoy Grill – I still can’t believe I had that chance to get to know him. Noël told me that he had been given a free room for life at the Savoy because he had played cabaret there during the war and had kept going, right through the Blitz. ‘Perfect for me . . .’ he confided, ‘a truly captive audience!’ He was warm and witty and a wonderful dinner companion, although I relished his waspish side. On one occasion I was describing the anti-Vietnam demos I could see from the window of my flat and how I had seen Vanessa Redgrave in the frontline. Noël sniffed. ‘She will keep on demonstrating,’ he said. ‘But then she’s a very tall girl and I suppose she’s pleased to sit down.’
From London we moved to Turin where all the great car stunts took place. We spent days throwing little Mini Coopers off the top of Mont Blanc. We needed about sixteen altogether by the time we had assembled a team of crash cars, stunt cars, doubles and others on standby, so we went to the British Motor Corporation, as it was then, and asked if they would donate some in return for the publicity the Mini would receive. They were fantastically snooty about it and said they could only manage a token few. Fiat, on the other hand, completely got the idea, and offered us as many cars as we wanted, including sports cars for the Mafia scene. No wonder the British car industry went down the toilet – The Italian Job was and still is the best publicity the Mini Cooper has ever had.
The Italian Job was a classic, British, family comic caper and it did very well at the time in the UK. America was another story. I got off the plane in LA on the first leg of the US publicity tour to be confronted by an ad in which a naked woman was perched in front of a gun-toting gangster – hardly family viewing. I more or less turned round on the spot and went back home. As a result, we never did the sequel and Charlie Croker and the boys are still in that bus hanging over the edge of the cliff.
I had no idea then of the cult status The Italian Job would achieve over the next nearly forty years: you can’t be aware at the time that you’re making an iconic movie. It’s been voted the twenty-seventh favourite British film of all time, apparently, and my line, ‘You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!’ was voted the favourite film one-liner ever. I don’t know about that