Billingsgate Fish Market Image: Tom Curtis / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
From Elephant to Hollywood is, I shamefully admit, just the sort of thing I like. Michael Caine's memoir is literate, thoughtful, more than a little sentimental, thoroughly respectable, without a harsh word for anyone but a few charmingly self-deprecating anecdotes.
Caine is actually the author of two other books, What's It All About, about his earlier career and Acting in Film, meant to explain what he knows about naturalistic acting for the camera. On Amazon, I see that it is paired with other acting technique books which I take to mean that actors read it to improve their technique.
Michael Caine is a storyteller and I greatly admire his interest in literature -- no surprise, really, because after all, I like that sort of thing too.
The enthusiasm he shows for his friends, his family, and the people who have helped him in his career is winning and probably a good template for anyone who wishes also to be successful.
I have read the first half of the book and the end of the book -- as I often do, I lost my place and somehow lost a big chunk of the middle. Having read the end of the book, I am startled to discover how many of his recent films I've seen: Sleuth, as directed by Kenneth Branagh, Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, Inception, The Prestige, Children of Men, The Quiet American, and Miss Congeniality.
One of the anecdotes I enjoyed most was the story of how he met his wife. It's a charming story that conveys both the storyteller's sense of himself as the darling of the gods and his immense good fortune to find a much-loved wife. One thinks of Homer.
His description of his father helped me to understand my own world. Although his father lived through the voting in of Labour after the war and the new opportunities for health care and education provided by Labour, his father remained unchanged in his firm belief that no one could help him. I found Caine's explanation of that psychology very helpful to me in trying to understand my own life; and I see that Caine presented a huge contrast to his father in his belief in the possibility of becoming a success.
Caine is a fine storyteller, and he tells a story so perfectly shaped I'm almost embarrassed to repeat it. Caine's father worked as a porter (I think) at the Billingsgate Fish Market on the north side of the Thames, the site of a centuries-old fish market. In 1982, the market was relocated to Canary Wharf and the Victorian building housing it was converted into a banquet hall.
There, Caine subsequently attended a party given by a wealthy friend. The strangeness of the journey that led him to be present at a luxurious party in what had been his father's workplace struck him and he shed a tear. Princess Michael of Kent asked him if he was all right and he told said it was only that his allergies were acting up.
At the end of the book, Caine offers a list of ten favorite films. After reading this list, I checked out No. 10 from the library because I'd never seen it and I did think it was wonderful. I love that even with his list he's giving a mention to something fine and helping to ensure it will find an audience. In reverse order then, his personal top ten favorites are Tell No One, the 2006 French thriller (distributed in the US by Music Box Films, a local company), The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Gone With the Wind, All That Jazz, The Maltese Falcon, Some Like It Hot, Charade, On the Waterfront, The Third Man, and Casablanca.
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