The Elephant to Hollywood (46 page)

6. The Maltese Falcon, 1941

This was the first gangster thriller I ever saw, and the first film John Huston ever directed. It was also the first of a series of three films that the then big star George Raft turned down, which consequently turned Humphrey Bogart into an icon. Bogart is fantastic, of course, but he’s backed up by an equally strong cast including Sidney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre. I fell in love with Dashiell Hammett’s dialogue and started to read his books whenever I could run them to earth in Fifties London. In fact Hammett wrote my favourite thriller line ever: ‘It was dark – and it wasn’t just the night.’
The Maltese Falcon
was the start of my love affair with film noir – which continues to this day.

5. Some Like It Hot, 1959

This remains one of the funniest films I have ever seen – and the most daring comedy. I had never seen a film where the stars dressed in drag; in the Fifties it was unheard of. Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis took a real chance with this and with the help of Billy Wilder and his script and the inspired casting of Marilyn Monroe, they made it an all-time great comedy. Many years later I was very close friends with both Irving Lazar and Billy Wilder and Irving told me he was with Billy when he showed the film to the critics for the first time and there was not a laugh during the entire film. After the show they went to Hamburger Hamlet and tough, unsentimental Billy burst into tears. He should have remembered the old theatre adage: ‘a paper [complementary] house never laughs’. I was having dinner with Billy one night and I asked him if Marilyn Monroe had been difficult to work with and he said that she had been. ‘She was always late,’ he said, ‘and she didn’t know her lines. But then,’ he went on, ‘I could have cast my Aunt Martha, and she would have been on time and she would have known her lines, but who the hell would have gone to see her?’ A typical Billy Wilder comment . . .

4. Charade, 1963

This is my favourite romantic movie of all time – it is also a great comedy and a great thriller and of course it is set in one of my favourite cities in the world, Paris. It’s also, in my view, one of the most underrated movies of all time. The film has a great sense of nostalgia for me as they shot a whole sequence in Les Halles, the old food market where we all used to go in the Sixties at two o’clock in the morning after all the nightclubs closed, to have French onion soup. The relationship between Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn is of course the main attraction of the film: they were superb. It’s full of brilliant one-liners and these two actors deliver them immaculately. Here are two of my favourites:

Regina
(
Audrey Hepburn
): I already know a lot of people and until one of them dies I couldn’t possibly meet anyone else.

Peter
(
Cary Grant
): Well, if anyone goes on the critical list, let me know . . .

And . . .

Regina
: You know what’s wrong with you, don’t you?

Peter
: No. What?

Regina
: Nothing.

Brilliant, isn’t it?

3. On the Waterfront, 1954

This film was a revelation to me. The script by Budd Schulberg, the direction of Elia Kazan and the performances of the actors took me into a working-class reality in a way that I had never experienced in a movie before. Marlon Brando, Karl Malden, Rod Steiger and Eva Marie Saint were all Method Actors. There are two main principles: the first is that the rehearsal is the work and the performance the relaxation, so by the time you get to work in front of a camera you should be so familiar with what you are doing it seems effortless. The second principle is that your acting should come from sense memory, finding a moment in your own life to produce a real and instant emotion – I use it to this day, if I am required to cry. Not that I think of some great tragic incident, it’s just something that struck me as terribly sad. I’ve never told anyone – not even Shakira, to whom I am closer to than anyone else in the world – what that moment is. If I did, I would then be thinking of her reaction rather than my own and it would lose its power. The result in this film is quite extraordinary – especially in that iconic scene in which Marlon Brando as Terry and Rod Steiger as Charlie are in the back of the car and Terry says, ‘I coulda been a contender. I could have been somebody . . .’ Unforgettable.

2. The Third Man, 1949

Another Graham Greene novel – this time he adapted it for screen himself. And like all great movies, this has a fantastic sense of time and place. Post-war Vienna is an extraordinary setting for what I consider to be the best thriller ever. (Although films like
Psycho
,
Rear Window
,
The Usual Suspects
and
Silence of the Lambs
all run it as close seconds.) It was photographed in black and white by Robert Krasker with strange camera angles and a gritty documentary style and it has an unsettling and unforgettable sense of menace. The cast is fabulous – Joseph Cotton and Orson Welles in particular – the first time they had appeared together since
Citizen Kane
. The movie is full of so many memorable sequences it is hard to pull out just one, but perhaps I would point to the scene in which Harry Lime and Holly Martins are at the top of the giant Ferris wheel overlooking Vienna and Martins asks Harry if he has ever seen any of his victims . . . Harry brushes it off and after they get back down to the ground says to Holly as he’s walking away, ‘Like the fella says, in Italy for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love – they had five hundred years of democracy and peace and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. So long, Holly.’ Genius – and this line was written not by Graham Greene, but by Orson Welles himself. Then there’s the action climax and the chase through the sewers and the romantic climax where Joseph Cotton is waiting at the cemetery gates as Alida Valli is coming away from Harry Lime’s funeral. It’s a long walk towards him – will she stop? Or will she walk straight past? I’m not going to tell you. If you haven’t seen it, do yourself a favour and get a DVD right now!

1. Casablanca, 1942

Well – what else was it going to be? It should have been just another reasonably successful movie churned out by Hollywood. In fact, it probably shouldn’t have worked at all. It started shooting without a finished screenplay, from a play that had never seen the stage called
Everybody Comes to Rick’s
. I met Julius Epstein, one of the twin brothers responsible for the screenplay, and he asked me if I knew the traffic light at the bottom of Benedict at Sunset Boulevard just by the Beverly Hills Hotel. I told him I knew it well and I hated it because it always seemed to stay red for about five minutes. He smiled. ‘It was waiting at that traffic light every day,’ he said, ‘that my brother Philip and I wrote a lot of
Casablanca
 . . .’

The studio wanted William Wyler to direct and ended up with Michael Curtz, who was, apparently, a very irritable and insensitive director. He was, however, responsible for a phrase still used today in English-speaking crews all over the world for a non-sound sequence. He was a Hungarian and whenever he wanted to do a scene without recorded sound he would shout out, ‘Mitt out sound!’, which became abbreviated to MOS.

It was another of those three films that Humphrey Bogart was only in because George Raft turned the part down and the studio had changed their mind about the original casting which was (picture this . . .) Ronald Reagan and Ann Sheridan. There was another problem: Bogart was about two inches shorter than Ingrid Bergman. I can’t imagine anyone asking Bogart to stand on a box, so this must have meant very difficult set-ups. On screen the two of them had a fantastic relationship, but that wasn’t the case off-screen and nor was it the case with the brilliant supporting cast, which includes Sidney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre and, of course, Claude Rains who nearly stole the film as Captain Renault. In fact, as Julius put it, ‘Nobody burst into tears when the movie finished shooting . . .’

But in spite of that, the film has gone on to be not only at the top of my list, but at the top of most people’s list. The music is memorable, and of course it contains some of the most often-quoted lines in the whole of the movie business. There are too many to mention here, but Rick’s line, ‘Of all the gin-joints in all the world, she walks into mine,’ stands out as one of the most poignant. And then there’s Rick’s famous last line, ‘I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.’ It wasn’t even in the original script. It was written by the producer, Hal Wallis and dubbed by Bogart later over the shot of him and Claude Rains walking away into the mist. To me this looks like Hal Wallis – who was a very smart producer – hinting at the studio for a sequel. It never happened – and perhaps it’s best that we leave it on that note. For me,
Casablanca
will always be number one.

My Own Favourite Movies

I can’t help being aware of the image I have in the media as a movie icon, not that Shakira allows me to get away with any icon-ish behaviour, as I’ve said. She’s right of course, but I also know that I have made some films that mean a lot to other people – and they are important to me, too. I can’t do a Top Ten of my own movies: it’s got to be a Top Thirteen, because there is something about each one of these that means a lot. I’ve never been superstitious about the number thirteen; my passport number for years was 13 13 13 – and that got me safely to plenty of places – so here they are, in the order in which I made them, and here’s why they matter to me.

Zulu
– my first big break. A wonderful introduction to the world of the movies and the first film in which I had a substantial part.

The Ipcress File
– this was the first movie in which my name was ‘above the title’.  Harry Salzman decided to do this even though it was not in my contract.  When I asked him why, he said: ‘If I don’t think you’re a star, who the hell else will?’

Alfie
– the biggest movie of my career to this point and the first movie of mine that was not only a success in the UK but also got a US release.  It was also my first nomination for an Academy Award . . .

Sleuth
– the hardest and the best work I had done up until then.  It was a two-handed show and the other hand was Lord Olivier, the greatest actor in the world.  I was the greatest actor from the Elephant and Castle.

The Man Who Would be King
– a movie co-starring Sean Connery, my great and long time friend, directed by John Huston, my great and long time idol, in which I played the part intended for Humphrey Bogart, my great and long time inspiration . . .  As the line in the movie went: ‘we were not little men.’

The Italian Job
– written for me by my friend Troy Kennedy Martin, shot in Italy, co-starring Noël Coward – enough said . . .

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels
– the funniest film I ever made – and the happiest.

Get Carter
– based on people I knew in my earlier life (not that they ever found out), this was made partly as a protest against the pornography of violence.  And it’s about honour, which was every bit as important where I came from as it was for the British aristocracy or the Sicilian Mafia.

The Quiet American
– I really feel that this is among my best work.  The character I played is the least like me of any characters I have played – but you’d never know . . .

Educating Rita
– like
The Quiet American
, I was playing another character I had little in common with – and I got an Academy Award nomination for them both.