The Elephant to Hollywood - Michael Caine [84]
In the end, many of the long shots in the film were actually played by a double – a real woman – who was as tall as me, but needed a bit of padding out. It was she who played the most notorious scene in the film when my character slashes Angie Dickinson’s character to death with a razor. It is a horrifying scene – one that I only saw later on – and it caused a lot of trouble at the time. Brian De Palma – who is one of the most technically proficient directors I’ve ever worked with – was insistent that it was the right thing to do. It was the only death in the entire movie and he wanted maximum impact: he got it, all right.
In fact Brian De Palma’s approach to directing reminded me very much of Alfred Hitchcock’s – not that I ever worked with Hitchcock, but I did get to know him very well. Neither of them were exactly Mr Warmth, but both of them were brilliant technically and went for a very cool approach, which is probably right for scary movies, where the editing has to be spot on because it’s less about the actors making connections with their audience and more about the atmosphere. I love the way Tarantino has taken the genre, played with it and turned it on its head: Pulp Fiction, in particular, I think is brilliant.
I reckon Dressed to Kill is a bloody good thriller – and it still scares me. It came out at around the time they were trying to catch the serial killer known as the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ and various groups lobbied the distributors to withdraw it in the north of England, because they claimed it might have encouraged the murders. (When they eventually caught Peter Sutcliffe they asked him if he had ever seen it and he hadn’t.)
I’m pretty sure my mother never got to see my performance in Dressed to Kill (just as well – it might have triggered memories of my father’s worst fears about my chosen career), but she did come out to visit us in Los Angeles at about this time. She was now eighty-one and almost everything about the trip and our life there was a completely new experience for her. She wasn’t going to let it faze her, though – rather like the mother of another British working-class lad made good and Hollywood neighbour of ours, David Hockney. When Mrs Hockney came over for afternoon tea with us and I asked her what she thought of Beverly Hills, she said, ‘It’s lovely, dear – but it’s a terrible waste.’ ‘Waste of what?’ I asked. ‘All that sunshine,’ she said, ‘and no one’s got the washing out!’ My own mother hit the nail right on the head without meaning to, in her usual guise as Mrs Malaprop. ‘Oooh,’ she said, pointing out of the car window at the lush flowers and plants on the way in to Beverly Hills from the airport, ‘look at all that hysteria climbing up the walls.’ She’d summed up Hollywood, in a nutshell.
When Dominique flew over to join us, the whole family was reunited and I took her and Mum to Las Vegas as a special treat. My mother was in her element and stayed up every night until three o’clock in the morning, partying as I suppose she’d never had the chance to as a young woman. Eventually she would agree that it was time to go to bed, although she wasn’t happy with the décor of her bedroom at Caesar’s Palace. ‘That mirror over the bed,’ she said. ‘What’s that for? Complete waste of money.’ I had to think on my feet: Mum still undressed in the dark. ‘It’s so women can put on their make-up before they get up,’ I offered. Mum sniffed. ‘Lazy cows,’ she said. Indeed.
After Mum went back to England (she was keen to catch up with her favourite soap opera), and we had taken a short holiday there, too, I went off to Hungary to work with John Huston again. This time it was on a film called Escape to Victory set during the Second World War and telling the story of a group of prisoners of war who play a game of soccer against