The Young Man Shows His Medals

In a snow-clogged clump of obscurity along a single-track Finnish rail line, a group of performers, extras and technicians gathered round a rheumatic old passenger train. "Will that door be closed?" the voice rasped at the director. "With a suitcase in one hand and snowshoes in the other, how the hell do I get the door open to get on the train?"

The door is left open, of course, because the voice belongs to Michael Caine, and every word he speaks these days is received as attentively as a ransom note. In the year and a half since his role as the bemused, workaday spy Harry Palmer in The Ipcress File shot him to sudden international splendor, Caine, 33, has appeared in four films, of which three--Funeral in Berlin, Alfie and Gambit--are among the nation's top box-office draws. A fifth picture, Hurry Sundown, with Jane Fonda, opened last week in Los Angeles. Now in Finland filming another Harry Palmer adventure, Billion-Dollar Brain, Caine carries enough professional clout to order the movie shot upside down if he chooses.

Long Road. Onscreen, Caine's impact seems half visceral, half sociological. He is professionally at home in such separate skins as those of an Establishment army officer or a U.S. Southerner, but his soul seems to belong to his working-class roles. He is that new hero, the chap who is supposedly above class--but if he really is, why does he keep aggressively displaying his non-U traits and compulsively needling Old Blighty's oldest values? With Caine, all this springs from something deeper than dialogue and technique, as does his mock-deadly appeal to women. He acquired these powers on "this long impossible road" from an impoverished Cockney London background through ten years of hardscrabble apprenticeship. "I've never had dramatic training," he says. "I'm a natural who has learned technique by mistakes."

Caine wears those early years like tattoos. He grew up in Southwark, in the part of London called Elephant and Castle, after a pub that was there long ago. From childhood he wanted out. "To be a Cockney is, well, like what the Negroes complain about in America," he says. "We're always sweeping the streets, washing the floors, operating lifts. The thing is that the Negro in America is militant about improving his position. But not the Cockney. I'm militant about improving my position, but I never had the backing of any of the others. When I was acting in repertory and would go back home, they used to laugh at me--it was deliberate, sadistic laughter, and I've never forgotten it."

Dear Old Mum. Caine plowed ahead through 31 years in repertory, bit parts in the movies and television--mixing it all with survival jobs in laundries, factories and a pie-baking establishment. He did not get a real chance to break loose until he landed a featured role in 1964 in the movie Zulu, "an African western," and that in turn led to Ipcress.

"My friends were all telling me: 'You haven't the face for a leading man,' " he recalls. But he remembered also something that Actor Peter O'Toole told him: "Don't play small parts in highly exposed places, because that'll make you a small-part actor. Play leading parts anywhere--in rubbish--but play leading parts." The advice worked well, and Caine is proud that he has made it the hard way. "I'd go back to the theater," he says, "but not yet. I've had art up to my eyebrows and I never made a penny. Never even got a bloody television award." For compensation there is $500,000 per picture--plus a small town house near Marble Arch that may soon give way to a large town house.

In the background of any story about a hero's rise from squalor to quiddery there should be Mum; Caine's is just about the best since J. M. Barrie's The Old Lady Shows Her Medals. He reports that he has finally persuaded his mother to give up her lifelong job as a charwoman. When he invited her to attend the premiere of his first big movie, she shyly refused, then, unbeknownst to him, just joined the crowd outside. She still takes the bus to his openings. "She used to tell me proudly how she had sat next to a real fine lady," says Caine. "It would make me bloody furious, and I'd ask her how she knew it was a fine lady. 'Because the lady had a gold watch and a diamond ring.' So I bought her a gold watch and a diamond ring, and she hasn't mentioned fine ladies since."

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