Solving a Minor Mystery

By the time I got around to reading Michael Caine’s splendid autobiography, What’s It All About? (the audiobook skips over much of the material in the printed book – as Caine put it, “you pays your money and you takes your chance”) in the late ‘90s, I was curious to find, when he arrived at his memories of making a film called Deadfall in 1968, the solution to a mystery that I’d been carrying around with me for twenty years. 

It must’ve been in 1978 or ’79 that I first watched the Bryan Forbes film Deadfall on late night television. Based on a novel by Desmond Cory, it’s about a pair of jewel thieves, Eric Portman and Michael Caine, who pull off a heist at what one might call the climax of the film that involves Caine using his expert cat burglar skills, which look more like mountaineering, to break into a villa whose owner has gone out to a local concert. The scene cross-cuts shots of the concert, that features a guitar concerto written for the film and conducted by John Barry, with the break-in. 

I won’t bother to write a review of the film, because I remember it chiefly for one otherwise insignificant detail that has no bearing whatever on its impact. Late in the film, when Henry, Michael Caine’s cat burglar character is casing a rich man’s palatial home for his next (and, alas, his last) heist, he attends a fancy dress ball where I could’ve sworn I recognized the English poet Robert Graves sitting at a table dressed like Ali Baba in a red turban. He speaks no lines in the scene, and merely looks up at Michael Caine when he approaches the table. Moments later, I saw him again, dancing wildly with other revelers. 

Graves wasn’t listed in the end credits, but they mentioned that the film was shot “on location in Spain.” I knew that Graves had lived in Spain, on the island of Majorca, since 1929, but aside from these tantalizing clues I had nothing else to go on in my search for a solution to the mystery. Was it Graves? I had fallen under his spell, which is precisely the right word for it, when I was in college around the same time I saw the film. I was quite taken with his studies in poetic mythology and his championing of the Matriarchy. 

Need I remind the reader that my minor mystery arose long before the Internet and personal computers were around to help me to solve it. As it turned out, it was Michael Caine’s autobiography that definitively solved it, which was published in 1992, also some time before the world wide web was commonly accessible. The Spanish locations that were used in Deadfall, it turns out, were on the island of Majorca. In his recruitment of non-professional “extras” to appear in the fancy dress party scene, Bryan Forbes asked the most famous expat on the island, the world-renowned poet Robert Graves, if he would like to join in the shooting. He agreed, but for reasons that were highly personal. Graves had been an officer in the British Army in World War I, and his regiment was the Royal Welch Fusiliers. He had heard that the star of Deadfall, Michael Caine, had served as a conscripted soldier in the same regiment and saw combat in Korea. As Caine relates in his book, during a break in the shooting of the fancy dress party, he was sitting alone and Graves approached him and introduced himself as a fellow Fusilier. Somebody snapped a photograph of them standing together.