The Elephant to Hollywood - Michael Caine [61]
If Finland for Billion Dollar Brain had been the coldest location I had ever worked on, then the Philippine jungle, where we shot Too Late the Hero must be the hottest – and the most uncomfortable. Too Late the Hero is set in the Second World War and is the story of a British troop (plus an American soldier, played by Cliff Robertson) sent to knock out a Japanese radio transmitter on a Pacific island. The landscape we were working in was stunning, but the poverty of the local people and the food were anything but and so the director Robert Aldrich had us work in two-week stints, followed by five days R & R.
On our first break from filming we went to Taiwan. I got lucky there in the hotel bar and found myself in the arms of a beautiful Chinese girl. She was a great fan of mine, she said, and seemed very keen to prove just how highly she regarded my performance at first hand. Unfortunately she had neglected to inform me that her father was a local dignitary . . . Later that night three Chinese policeman armed with machine guns burst into my room. ‘Papers!’ one of them barked at me, pulling the bedclothes off. The others were opening cupboards and looking under the bed. I looked around wildly, but it seemed my companion had already slipped away. I handed over my passport. The chief policeman glared at it for a minute and then glared at me. Suddenly a big smile broke out over his face. ‘Alfie!’ he said happily. ‘You are Alfie! Me,’ he thumped himself on his chest, ‘I am Chinese Alfie! I fuck many women.’ Yeah, right, I thought, but I nodded vigorously. It wasn’t the first time Alfie had come out of the woodwork to save the day.
We endured the heat, the humidity and the mosquitoes and the often considerably greater risks attendant on our various R & R expeditions because we believed that the story behind Too Late the Hero deserved its authentic location. But when I finally got to see the finished picture I can’t say I thought the misery had been worthwhile. The jungle shots just looked like an anonymous mass of trees – it might as well have been filmed in Borehamwood.
After a brief respite in Hollywood, which I felt I thoroughly deserved, I set off for Innsbruck in Austria in autumn 1969 to film The Last Valley, which was set during the Thirty Years War. Glorious Austrian location, delicious food, a co-star like Omar Sharif – what could go wrong? Well, for a start, I couldn’t get my hotel room cleaned. In the end, I had to complain to the hotel management who looked into it and came back to me a bit embarrassed. My room was on the same floor as Omar’s but a bit further down the passage and it seemed that on Omar’s days off, the maid somehow never made it past his room along to mine . . . And then there was the fact that the film was set in the Middle Ages and I was playing the captain of a mercenary force: horses were involved again. Dominique – by now an expert horsewoman – had told me that I should make sure to ask for a docile mount and to stipulate that it had to be a mare. I duly followed her instructions and so was taken aback to find myself confronted with not only the biggest horse I had ever seen, but one that featured a pair of the biggest balls I had ever seen. The horse was as quiet as can be, I was assured, and had been chosen with me in mind. His name – I should have suspected something – was Fury.
My first few rides on Fury were uneventful and I began to relax. But on the first day of shooting, he seemed to switch personality. I had changed into costume and had planned to start the day with a little trot. The trot began sedately enough but soon turned into a canter and then began to gather speed until it turned into a gallop I had no chance of controlling. We were eventually brought to a screaming halt (it was me doing the screaming) by a jeep from the unit, three miles from the set. I have rarely been