The Elephant to Hollywood - Michael Caine [62]
He may have been responsible for that fact that my room was never hoovered, but Omar Sharif was fantastic to work with on The Last Valley. A great actor, he can maintain a poker face better than almost anyone else I know – I’m not surprised he’s a champion bridge player – and he’s a cool customer, too. We were once sitting in a bar during some time off when a group of tough Austrian lads came in. They had had a bit too much to drink and saw these two actors sitting there and started making loud comments about us and our sexuality – all in perfect English. We just sat there, ignoring them, nodding away and chatting. They ratcheted up the invective, but we hung on in there and kept our cool, which seemed to rile them even more. Of course what they didn’t know was that sitting all around us at the other tables was our entire stunt team, just waiting for us to give them the nod. After about ten minutes, the Austrians could take it no longer, pushed back their chairs, and squared up to us. They wanted a fight. Omar and I stood up, too – they must have thought, blimey, these actors have got some guts – but then the stunt team stood up – and, well, I’m afraid there was a bit of a ruckus and some of those Austrians ended up being thrown out of windows that were firmly shut.
I’d taken on The Last Valley because I’d wanted to try my hand at something a bit more serious. Ever since Alfie I had been identified with his character as a bird-pulling Cockney bloke and I was determined to try to change that view. In The Last Valley, ‘The Captain’ and his group of mercenaries wind up spending the winter in a peaceful valley. He was apparently a man of great brutality. I wanted to get behind that to show that in fact he was someone who had other qualities; that he was a man who had come to understand the futility of war. It is an understated performance – like most of my work – but it’s one of the ones that I am most proud of, although I knew pretty well as soon as we finished filming that it wasn’t going to work at the box office, despite the quality of the movie and the brilliant score by John Barry. It may have been timing again – we were in the middle of the Vietnam War and the Middle Ages seemed irrelevant – and it may have been the level of violence (the censors asked for some of the bloodier scenes to be cut), but I was right: the film was not regarded as a success when it was eventually released.
So the sixties ended for me on a bit of a depressing note. The decade had given me so much, but I was only too aware that all good things come to an end and that things – and people – were already moving on. Dennis Selinger and I flew off to spend Christmas with Harry Saltzman and his family in Acapulco and I took the chance to pause and decide what I wanted to do next. I had spent the past ten years going from film to film almost without a break. I had worked with some great producers, but I had also worked with some really bad ones. Now, I thought, I would do something I had always wanted to do: produce a film of my own. I made sure that my next project allowed me to do just that, alongside my friend Michael Klinger, a professional producer.
There’s a danger, when making films, of romanticising violence. I know only too well what the other side of violence looks like