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In honoring Sir Michael Caine (b. 1933), MoMA celebrates one of British and American postwar cinema’s most endearing and enduring actors. Widely admired for his professionalism, relatability, and self-effacing charm, Caine has mentored many in the craft of acting, whether in his films or in his popular master classes and books, suggesting that “what you should get from my performance, to quote Edmund Wilson, is a ‘shock of recognition.’ I want people to see me on the screen and say, ‘I am him.’”
Caine got his first big break some 60 years ago as the supercilious British Army Lieutenant Gonville Bromhead in Cy Endfield’s Zulu (1964). Fame followed quickly thereafter when Caine received top billing as the cockney tomcat in Lewis Gilbert’s Alfie (1966) and as Harry Palmer, the novelist Len Deighton’s reluctant spy, in a succession of intelligent James Bond spinoffs: Sidney Furie’s The Ipcress File (1965), Guy Hamilton’s Funeral in Berlin (1966), and Ken Russell’s Billion Dollar Brain (1967). This retrospective features these and other cherished performances in films like Mike Hodges’s Get Carter (1971) and Pulp (1972), Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Sleuth (1972), John Huston’s The Man Who Would Be King (1975), Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), Frank Oz’s Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988), Phillip Noyce’s The Quiet American (2002), and Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight (2008). Also presented are some of Caine’s more underappreciated films, including André de Toth’s Play Dirty (1969); Charles Jarrott and Anthony Page’s Male of the Species (1969), an episodic British television film also starring Sean Connery and Paul Scofield; James Clavell’s The Last Valley (1971); and Daniel Barber’s Harry Brown (2009).