Michael Caine's early films defined the look of an era, but with scores by John Barry, Quincy Jones and Sonny Rollins they also defined its soundrack
There is a kind of music in Michael Caine's voice: deceptively flat, barely inflected, emitting just the tiniest glints of detached insolence and laconic menace as it maps the area between the pre-war docklands community of Rotherhithe, his birthplace, and Elephant and Castle, where his family was rehoused in a prefab built on bomb-damaged land not far from the location of Shakespeare's theatres. Few people alive know more about the actor's craft than Caine, none is more gifted in the art of underplaying, and that voice is integral to his virtuosity.
But there is music of a more conventional kind in the films that made him famous – when the former Maurice Micklewhite rather unexpectedly became the model of a new kind of English leading man,...
There is a kind of music in Michael Caine's voice: deceptively flat, barely inflected, emitting just the tiniest glints of detached insolence and laconic menace as it maps the area between the pre-war docklands community of Rotherhithe, his birthplace, and Elephant and Castle, where his family was rehoused in a prefab built on bomb-damaged land not far from the location of Shakespeare's theatres. Few people alive know more about the actor's craft than Caine, none is more gifted in the art of underplaying, and that voice is integral to his virtuosity.
But there is music of a more conventional kind in the films that made him famous – when the former Maurice Micklewhite rather unexpectedly became the model of a new kind of English leading man,...
- 1/31/2014
- by Richard Williams
- The Guardian - Film News
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