My Worst Location

The British actor Michael Caine is becoming better known since the Brexit vote for his cranky political views than for his acting, which has been in steep decline since he went on a 5-year hiatus from acting in the 1990s and, as Stanley Kauffmann put it, "came back without his talent." (1)

Basically Caine has come to believe, since he and many other rich British people had to move out of Britain when, in the 1980s, a Labour government imposed taxes on them that were so draconian that he couldn't get any richer and he had to go into voluntary exile to the US, that people who live on government benefits are merely being "lazy" and that England would be better off if nobody got government support. After moving back to England in 2009, he stated "The government has taken tax up to 50%, and if it goes to 51% I will be back in America. We've got 3.5 million layabouts on benefits, and I'm 76, getting up at 6am to go to work to keep them. Let's get everybody back to work so we can save a couple of billion and cut tax, not keep sticking it up." Caine also believes that Brexit will restore to his country all of its former glory and prestige. If you share in this delusion I highly recommend a book by James Hamilton-Paterson called What We Have Lost that will disabuse you. (2)

Caine's conservative political views are all the more surprising when one reads his biography, What's It All About? (3) Caine hadn't just seen poverty, he knew it intimately throughout his childhood when his name was Maurice Micklewhite. Were the members of his poor family lazy wastrels, as he now believes unemployed people are? The biggest revelation in What's It All About? was also an enormous shock for Caine as well when, in 1989, upon the death of his mother, he was told that he had a half-brother, David, whom his mother had before she became Mrs. Micklewhite. David was born with severe epilepsy, a condition which left him unable to control his muscles or to speak. He was neither an idiot nor insane, yet at the time it was considered best for him to be confined to an asylum for incurables his entire life until such institutions were closed and he was moved to a more humane hospital. David died in 1992, just after Caine's book was published. His mother had kept the existence of David a secret from everyone, including her husband. And as Caine revealed, 

The most extraordinary information I was given, however, was the fact that for sixty-two years of his life, with the exception of the Second World War and her time with us in Beverly Hills, my mother had visited him every Monday, without my late father, my brother Stanley or me ever knowing anything about it. 

Last week I published my review of Last Orders and I had completely forgotten about Caine's half-brother and his mother's weekly visits to him, just as Amy Dodds had visited her daughter June every week in Graham Swift's novel and Fred Schepisi's film. 

For me, as an involuntary resident of the Philippines for the past 14 years, the most interesting chapter in Caine's memoir was the one called "My Worst Location." As Caine delineates them, 

The best location is, of course, near where you live, and failing that, a place where you would normally pay to go on holiday. I have a dream of opening a script and reading: ‘As the yacht sailed in to St Tropez harbour …’ Usually locations do not come up to this standard. 

The worst location I have ever worked in was the Philippine jungle, where Too Late the Hero, a World War Two story of a battle between a small unit of British soldiers and one American against the Japanese, was filmed. Robert Aldrich, the director, kept us there for twenty-two weeks.(4) 

An enormous American naval base was our destination as we set off on the long journey through some of the poorest villages I had seen since Korea. All around us was dense jungle and great hill ranges. A lot of it was very beautiful – if you were short-sighted and didn’t notice the human misery. So shooting began, in some of the worst conditions I had ever encountered on a film. We were plagued by insects, thorns and 120º temperatures every day, accompanied by the highest humidity that it is possible to measure. The food, I was sure, must be alive with organisms unknown to modern science so my daytime diet consisted solely of sardines and Australian cheese which came out of tins opened in my presence and then consumed before anything else could touch them. The only thing that saved our sanity was our visits to the officers’ mess in the navy base, where we could get a good shower, great food and cold drinks, and watch television. Life was perfect in the evenings, until we had to return to our mosquito-ridden cribs. 

Since the director had a shooting schedule of fourteen days straight and five days off, Caine took his first break in Taiwan. 

We decided to spend our next break ‘at home’ at the naval base. It was here that I met one of the toughest guys ever. He was a member of one of the American secret services, was six feet six inches tall and rejoiced in the name of Toy. He it was who took us on our first and only foray into the local town called Olongapo. This was a place with a population of about twenty thousand people, half of whom were prostitutes serving the naval base. We had heard tales about Olongapo but had been warned off it since it was dangerous for Europeans. 

We were all drinking in the officers’ mess one night when Toy suggested that we should go and visit the place at least once. We told him about the danger and he said not to worry and pulled his jacket open to reveal a heavy .45 automatic in an underarm holster. A wave of courage swept over us and we decided to take a chance. 

Olongapo turned out to be just one long shanty-town main street, brightly lit with neon signs for wall-to-wall bars and discos, and with very dark alleys leading off the street at intervals. ‘Don’t move off the main street,’ yelled Toy above the din of music from a thousand speakers. ‘We’ll never find the body if you do.’ We all moved closer to Toy for safety, like ducklings on a pond and followed him into Sodom and Gomorrah. 

The poverty and stench of the place were unbelievable. We finally found a bar that looked as though they changed the washing-up water at least once per day and went in. The moment we sat down we were smothered with ladies offering various specialities, some of which I must admit I had never heard of before. We all settled for whisky, which seemed to be the safest drink and ordered a round for the girls. I looked at them closely and thought that here I was, surrounded by young available scantily-clad girls, and instead of it being erotic or sexy or even interesting, it was just sad. I looked closely at their badly made-up, prematurely ravaged faces and saw the eyes go dead the moment no one was looking. These kids had been forced here by grinding poverty. Being an actor I not only listened to what they said, but to how they said it, and they all said exactly the same thing in the same way, as though they had all attended the same school, to be taught how to extract money from Europeans. 

Our drinks arrived and before I could pick mine up the girl next to me got out one of her breasts and dipped it into my drink. ‘That will give it a good flavour,’ she said. Not wishing to offend I ‘accidentally’ knocked over my glass and ordered an ice-cold beer instead, hoping that it would be too cold for anyone to be tempted to dip anything else in it. 

We went the rounds of some of the other places but there was such a depressing air of poverty hanging like a cloud over Olongapo that we fled back to the comparative gaiety of the naval base. 

At long last, after what seemed like an eternity of heat, sweat, insects, and a particularly nasty sweatrash labelled appropriately by the Americans as ‘the Crud’, the location shooting was over and it was back to Hollywood for the studio work, with a few days off for partying en route in Manila. And boy, did we party. After a while, though, my social conscience began getting in the way. The gap between the rich and the poor here was the widest I had ever seen in a so-called civilised country. The poor were completely destitute while the rich, with whom we, of course, were mixing, lived in the kind of luxury unknown even in the super-rich countries of the west. I remember going into a party one evening, and seeing the local children rummaging through the rubbish bins from the house and eating the scraps that they found there, only to find inside that the cabaret for the evening was the cream of the Bolshoi Ballet flown in from Moscow especially for that one function. 

On my way home, I stopped the car at the garbage cans and watched the children for a while, thinking how fortunate I had been with my own childhood. Once upon a time I had thought it so poor but never again. The kids finally spotted me and came over to ask for money. I gave them all that I had on me and drove home with tears of anger in my eyes at a society that could treat its own people like this. 

At another party the hostess came over and took me by the arm, saying, ‘There is someone here that I would like you to meet.’ She guided me to the end of the room to a dais that I had not noticed before, and seated upon it were two men deep in conversation. They stopped talking and stood up as we approached, and she introduced me to the leader of this system, President-for-life Marcos. Ferdinand Marcos had the sort of face that I associated with the children outside: the milk of human kindness had long since gone sour in it. (5)

Finally the hellish shoot was finished and Caine flew to Los Angeles with boundless relief:

I finished the worst location of my career – and when I eventually saw the picture, the most unnecessary one. The shots in the jungle were just a mass of trees that could have been taken anywhere. I was reminded of the old director King Vidor who, when asked why a certain film could not go on an expensive location, said, ‘A tree is a tree – shoot it in Griffith Park.’ 

I first visited the Philippines in 1993, two years after Subic Naval Base, adjacent to Olongapo, had been permanently closed. Although I had come to the Philippines to sample the nightlife (I was then a sailor stationed in Okinawa), it was a lot more subdued than it had been in the bad old days of the open bases - and I thank god for it. With dozens of bars instead of hundreds, in a place that was still recovering from the eruption of the Pinatubo volcano in 1991,my vacation was a great deal more relaxed. But that is a story still waiting to be told. 

(1) The New Republic, February 18, 2002.

(2) What We Have Lost: The Dismantling of Great Britain (London: Head of Zeus, 2018).

(3) What's It All About? (London: Random House, 1992).

(4) Caine claims it took twenty-two weeks to shoot, but it was only eight. The difference of fourteen weeks in Caine's memory is probably due to two months in hell seeming like nearly six. Ironically, most of the shooting was done on an isolated island called Boracay, which has since been designated one of the world's best beach resorts.

(5) And now the President-for-life's son, Ferdinand, Jr., is the Philippines' president.