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Michael Caine – 'from Alfie to Zulu'. Digger reviews two of Michael Caine’s most famous films.

The early sixties was a time when regional accents in music, film and TV became not just acceptable but almost mandatory. Upper or middle-class accents were definitely out of fashion. Ironic, then, that the King of Cockney, Michael Caine, made his cinematic breakthrough playing someone from the Victorian officer classes.

As The Battle Of Britain was to do five years later, Zulu celebrates, on one level at least, a famous British victory. But, more than that, it is a memorial to the brave men on both sides and of all ranks. Impressively produced by Caine’s co-star Stanley Baker, who resists the temptation to elevate his own character and gives the whole cast a chance to shine, the movie is nevertheless not really a great vehicle for Caine to ‘strut his stuff’. He performs well enough but the sparkle is not there - in his later movies he is able to develop his characters and exude his personality in bucketloads. Amongst the horrors of war there are some great moments of sensitivity – the Welsh baritone fatally wounded in the throat, the death of a calf which had been nursed by one of the soldiers, both officers sickened and shamed by their first engagement. This could almost be classed as an anti-war film although it doesn’t try to make any judgements – after all, the Zulu nation was as imperialistic and warfaring as the British at that time. Unlike other sixties films which show their age and certainly are a product of their times, Zulu is as fresh today as it was when it was released in 1964.

Alfie
Michael Caine is Alfie. The posters for the movie were, for once, accurate in their hype. Caine plays philanderer and bastard Alfie so well that I find it unnerving – why do I like this character so much? Almost childlike in some ways, he is an out-and-out rogue, flitting from one relationship to another, using and abusing his women in the process. He gets his come-uppance in the end and maybe this, together with his what-you-see-is-what-you-get approach, allows us to sympathise with him.

The pedigree of the female stars adds an extra fascination to Alfie. Jane Asher was famously Paul McCartney’s girlfriend at the time - we have her to thank as the inspiration for many of Paul’s greatest love songs. Eleanor Bron had starred in Help! and was a mainstay of the satire movement with Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and David Frost, as was Millicent Martin, previously song-bird on That Was The Week That Was. Julia Foster and Shirley Anne Field both carved out fine acting careers. But I can’t help thinking that all of these ladies were rather under-used, certainly in British film. I am sure that American equivalents would have been given the full star treatment. Certainly, the only player whose career was visibly accelerated by the film was Caine himself.

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