Talkin’ about My Generation (again)
My Generation (out of 4) Documentary of Swinging London of the 1960s, as recalled by Michael Caine and his famous friends. Directed by David Batty. Now at Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema. 85 minutes. PG
The prospect of viewing yet another documentary about Baby Boomers, Swinging London and the 1960s could prompt hallucinations even in people who aren’t on LSD.
What’s left to say about history’s most ardent navel-gazers?
Plenty, argues actor Michael Caine in My Generation, a doc by Britain’s David Batty that wins you over by dint of its affection and access. Caine roamed London in the ’60s, rubbing shoulders with the Beatles, Rolling Stones and Twiggy, and he remembers everything — he swears he only smoked marijuana once and then “laughed for five hours.”
Caine is a genial tour guide for this magical memory tour. He’s seen both at his current age, a vital 85, and also in archival screen images from his youth, when he was becoming famous for zeitgeist-ful films like Alfie and The Ipcress File. My Generation largely gazes at the giant navel that was London, and rightly so — the city really was Ground Zero for the so-called generational “youthquake.” In doing so, the film wisely resists the standard documentary technique of stringing together a series of talking heads — no small temptation, given the famous people rounded up for reminiscing.
Caine chats with chums with bold-face names — rockers Paul McCartney and Roger Daltrey, fashionistas Mary Quant and Twiggy, celebrity photographer David Bailey and more, but their voices are heard over youthful video of themselves or collages of the wild London scene. The combined visual and aural effect is not unlike the experimental films of the NFB’s Arthur Lipsett, which were of the same era.
Editor Ben Hilton certainly has a way with archival images.
It’s all set to a pop soundtrack that includes gems like the Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields Forever,” the Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” and the Kinks’ “You Really Got Me,” which would make for a dandy soundtrack LP if Caine, who also takes a production credit, is able to finagle the song licensing.
Anybody seeking deep wisdom out of all this is likely to be disappointed, but Caine and company do offer cogent insights into just how entrenched the British class system was when the young’uns arrived to blow up the status quo.
“Suddenly, people realized that the working class wasn’t as thick as it looked — and it had talent! ... It was a revolution,” McCartney says.
Caine tells of showing up for an audition for a small role in Zulu, the 1964 historical epic of a famous battle between British soldiers and Zulu warriors in South Africa. The part would have had him speaking in his natural Cockney accent, but another actor had already grabbed it.
Director Cy Endfield, an American, asked Caine if he could speak in a “posh” British accent, which Caine insisted he could. He got the major role of Lieut. Gonville Bromhead, a breakthrough for his film career.
ABritish director would never have given a Cockney speaker a role like that, Caine says, because class distinctions would have made it impossible.
You don’t have to take Caine’s word for it on that point. The film obliges with archival footage of bowler-hatted toffs and scowling nuns, the kind who would later be skewered on Monty Python, expounding how the youth of the ’60s are all going to hell in a handcart.
There are other plum visits down memory lane, which are really more like revisits, since they’ve been made so often. Quant tells again how she launched the miniskirt craze.
Rocker Marianne Faithfull amusingly summons once more the famous drug bust at Keith Richards’ Redlands country estate, where she became tabloid fodder as the mystery “naked girl in a fur rug” after cops rousted the place.
It gets a little repetitive, even at a brisk 85 minutes, but Caine leaves us with a fair argument, that the 1960s were “maybe the first time the future was shaped by young people.”
Dunno if that’s true, but it’s got a good beat and you can dance to it.