The Elephant to Hollywood (19 page)

I had no idea then of the cult status
The Italian Job
would achieve over the next nearly forty years: you can’t be aware at the time that you’re making an iconic movie. It’s been voted the twenty-seventh favourite British film of all time, apparently, and my line, ‘You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!’ was voted the favourite film one-liner ever. I don’t know about that – there’s plenty of competition – but I do know that it’s a favourite of mine. We thought it was a funny line at the time. I remember we had to do several takes because we were laughing so much we ruined them, which pissed Peter Collinson off a bit because he just wanted us to get on with it, but we had no idea anyone would pick up on it. I’ve been a bit more aware of one-liners since, though. In
Get Carter
, the one-liner (two lines actually, but who’s counting?) that everyone remembers is, ‘You’re a big man, but you’re out of shape. For me it’s a full time job.’ People are always quoting that at me. I wondered while we were making it if there was going to be an iconic line in
Harry Brown
, but it wasn’t until I was watching it a while later that I suddenly spotted it . . . It’s the line where my character says to the drug dealer when his gun doesn’t fire, ‘You failed to maintain your weapon.’ And I thought, the lads will use that. I can imagine a pub on a Saturday night and a guy comes in and says, ‘My girlfriend’s left me,’ and they all turn to him and say in a chorus, ‘You failed to maintain your weapon!’

In
The Italian Job
, there’s also the matter of the cliffhanger (literally) at the end. There’s been a lot of speculation about this and in 2008 the Royal Society of Chemistry launched a competition for the most scientifically plausible solution to Croker’s problem. The winner came up with an ingenious idea, but in fact what we had planned was that I would crawl up the bus, switch on the engine and wait until it ran out of petrol. That would rebalance the weight so we could all get out – but the bus (and the gold) would then drop over the edge of the cliff into the arms of the Mafia waiting below. The sequel would have been all about us getting it back – shame it was never made!

From Turin I went more or less straight on to my next project, which was a small part in Harry Saltzman’s next production,
The
Battle of Britain
. Harry had had me under contract since
The Ipcress File
, but he was a fair man and as I became more and more successful he reflected this by upping my payment each year on my birthday. This birthday, my thirty-fifth, he gave me the usual envelope but instead of the usual revised contract it contained the original, ripped up. ‘You’re on your own now,’ he said.

I only had a small part in
The Battle of Britain
, but it was a film I particularly wanted to be involved with. As a boy who had had to leave London because of the Blitz, and as an evacuee who had grown up in Norfolk watching pilots taking off, some of whom never came back, I was well aware of the debt we owed to ‘the few’ and here was a chance to pay tribute to these brave young men. It was also a chance to get to know some of the pilots who had actually flown in the Battle. Ginger Lacey and Bob Stanford Tuck were acting as technical advisors to the film – as was Adolf Galland, the Luftwaffe pilot who had led the German attack. What I couldn’t quite get over was how young they had all been – until I remembered that I was only nineteen when I was in Korea. I’m not sure the stakes for Britain were quite as high in that conflict, though.

Flying is way out of my league. I didn’t learn to swim until I was twelve, and I’ve never learnt to ski or water-ski. I didn’t drive a car until I was much, much older. These things just weren’t available when I was growing up during and just after wartime, and they weren’t available in the Elephant in peacetime, either.  So I can’t fly and I have no desire to learn: I like to leave that sort of thing to the professionals. But the director, Guy Hamilton, was very keen on absolute authenticity and wanted to film us in the open Spitfire cockpits speeding as if to take off. I squeezed myself into the pilot’s seat and sat there waiting for ‘Action’ to be called, almost as nervous as if I were really going into battle. ‘Whatever you do,’ yelled Ginger Lacey, who was coaching me, ‘don’t touch the Red Button!’ The Red Button? I looked down and there by my left knee was indeed a Red Button. ‘Why not?’ I bawled back. ‘You’ll take off!’ he shouted cheerfully. ‘Action!’ In a complete panic I shunted over to the far right as I hurtled down the runway, the only Spitfire pilot ever to get ready for take-off with his legs crossed.

If Finland for
Billion Dollar Brain
had been the coldest location I had ever worked on, then the Philippine jungle, where we shot
Too Late the Hero
must be the hottest – and the most uncomfortable.
Too Late the Hero
is set in the Second World War and is the story of a British troop (plus an American soldier, played by Cliff Robertson) sent to knock out a Japanese radio transmitter on a Pacific island. The landscape we were working in was stunning, but the poverty of the local people and the food were anything but and so the director Robert Aldrich had us work in two-week stints, followed by five days R & R.

On our first break from filming we went to Taiwan. I got lucky there in the hotel bar and found myself in the arms of a beautiful Chinese girl. She was a great fan of mine, she said, and seemed very keen to prove just how highly she regarded my performance at first hand. Unfortunately she had neglected to inform me that her father was a local dignitary . . . Later that night three Chinese policeman armed with machine guns burst into my room. ‘Papers!’ one of them barked at me, pulling the bedclothes off. The others were opening cupboards and looking under the bed. I looked around wildly, but it seemed my companion had already slipped away. I handed over my passport. The chief policeman glared at it for a minute and then glared at me. Suddenly a big smile broke out over his face. ‘Alfie!’ he said happily. ‘You are Alfie! Me,’ he thumped himself on his chest, ‘I am
Chinese
Alfie! I fuck many women.’ Yeah, right, I thought, but I nodded vigorously. It wasn’t the first time Alfie had come out of the woodwork to save the day.

We endured the heat, the humidity and the mosquitoes and the often considerably greater risks attendant on our various R & R expeditions because we believed that the story behind
Too Late the Hero
deserved its authentic location. But when I finally got to see the finished picture I can’t say I thought the misery had been worthwhile. The jungle shots just looked like an anonymous mass of trees – it might as well have been filmed in Borehamwood.

After a brief respite in Hollywood, which I felt I thoroughly deserved, I set off for Innsbruck in Austria in autumn 1969 to film
The Last Valley
, which was set during the Thirty Years War. Glorious Austrian location, delicious food, a co-star like Omar Sharif – what could go wrong? Well, for a start, I couldn’t get my hotel room cleaned. In the end, I had to complain to the hotel management who looked into it and came back to me a bit embarrassed. My room was on the same floor as Omar’s but a bit further down the passage and it seemed that on Omar’s days off, the maid somehow never made it past his room along to mine . . . And then there was the fact that the film was set in the Middle Ages and I was playing the captain of a mercenary force: horses were involved again. Dominique – by now an expert horsewoman – had told me that I should make sure to ask for a docile mount and to stipulate that it had to be a mare. I duly followed her instructions and so was taken aback to find myself confronted with not only the biggest horse I had ever seen, but one that featured a pair of the biggest balls I had ever seen. The horse was as quiet as can be, I was assured, and had been chosen with me in mind. His name – I should have suspected something – was Fury.

My first few rides on Fury were uneventful and I began to relax. But on the first day of shooting, he seemed to switch personality. I had changed into costume and had planned to start the day with a little trot. The trot began sedately enough but soon turned into a canter and then began to gather speed until it turned into a gallop I had no chance of controlling. We were eventually brought to a screaming halt (it was me doing the screaming) by a jeep from the unit, three miles from the set. I have rarely been angrier and let rip at the director, James Clavell, as soon as I was back. He sat calmly absorbing my anger and then got up, took me by the arm and led me to a quiet corner and gave me one of the best lessons of my life. ‘I was a prisoner of the Japanese during the war,’ he said, ‘and the reason I survived and others did not is that I never lost face. If you lose your temper in front of people you do not know, you lose their respect and it is almost impossible to win it back. You must keep control – if you cannot control yourself, then you have no chance of controlling others. The reason the horse ran away was that your sword was slapping against his side as you began to trot. He thought you were urging him on to go faster and faster.’ I have never forgotten his advice.

He may have been responsible for that fact that my room was never hoovered, but Omar Sharif was fantastic to work with on
The Last Valley
. A great actor, he can maintain a poker face better than almost anyone else I know – I’m not surprised he’s a champion bridge player – and he’s a cool customer, too. We were once sitting in a bar during some time off when a group of tough Austrian lads came in. They had had a bit too much to drink and saw these two actors sitting there and started making loud comments about us and our sexuality – all in perfect English. We just sat there, ignoring them, nodding away and chatting. They ratcheted up the invective, but we hung on in there and kept our cool, which seemed to rile them even more. Of course what they didn’t know was that sitting all around us at the other tables was our entire stunt team, just waiting for us to give them the nod. After about ten minutes, the Austrians could take it no longer, pushed back their chairs, and squared up to us. They wanted a fight. Omar and I stood up, too – they must have thought, blimey, these actors have got some guts – but then the stunt team stood up – and, well, I’m afraid there was a bit of a ruckus and some of those Austrians ended up being thrown out of windows that were firmly shut.

I’d taken on
The Last Valley
because I’d wanted to try my hand at something a bit more serious. Ever since
Alfie
I had been identified with his character as a bird-pulling Cockney bloke and I was determined to try to change that view. In
The Last Valley
, ‘The Captain’ and his group of mercenaries wind up spending the winter in a peaceful valley. He was apparently a man of great brutality. I wanted to get behind that to show that in fact he was someone who had other qualities; that he was a man who had come to understand the futility of war. It is an understated performance – like most of my work – but it’s one of the ones that I am most proud of, although I knew pretty well as soon as we finished filming that it wasn’t going to work at the box office, despite the quality of the movie and the brilliant score by John Barry. It may have been timing again – we were in the middle of the Vietnam War and the Middle Ages seemed irrelevant – and it may have been the level of violence (the censors asked for some of the bloodier scenes to be cut), but I was right: the film was not regarded as a success when it was eventually released.

So the sixties ended for me on a bit of a depressing note. The decade had given me so much, but I was only too aware that all good things come to an end and that things – and people – were already moving on. Dennis Selinger and I flew off to spend Christmas with Harry Saltzman and his family in Acapulco and I took the chance to pause and decide what I wanted to do next. I had spent the past ten years going from film to film almost without a break. I had worked with some great producers, but I had also worked with some really bad ones. Now, I thought, I would do something I had always wanted to do: produce a film of my own. I made sure that my next project allowed me to do just that, alongside my friend Michael Klinger, a professional producer.

There’s a danger, when making films, of romanticising violence. I know only too well what the other side of violence looks like and I wanted to show that other side in
Get Carter
, a film based on a novel called
Jack’s Return Home
by Ted Lewis. In it, I play a tough London-based gangster who goes home to Newcastle to avenge the murder of his brother and deals ruthlessly with anyone who gets in his way. Mike Hodges, the director, came up with the idea of casting John Osborne as the gangster boss and I thought he’d be brilliant – which he was. We’d known each other well since before his
Look Back in Anger
days – we’d been out of work together – and we were old friends. He loved being the toughest guy and his performance is truly chilling.