CAINE’S SWINGING ’60S
Documentary revisits London
In My Generation, the new documentary about London during the swinging ’60s, actor Michael Caine talks about an unofficial job he had.
Caine says he did “air-traffic control” for a friend. And by air-traffic control he means he was safely keeping “birds,” a.k.a. women his friend was dating, from bumping into each other as they came and went in and out of the apartment.
In the film the playboy’s name is not revealed, but this week during a phone interview, the 85-year-old Caine didn’t flinch when asked to name the libidinous lad with whom he lived.
“Terence Stamp. He was very good-looking. A big ladies man,” said Caine.
No kidding. Do a Google search for confirmation of Stamp’s 1960s appeal.
Good looks and charm were certainly a single man’s best friends, but timing was also a big factor. It was London in the early 1960s and literally everything had changed. Sex was no longer a dirty word. Women’s skirts were shorter and men’s hair was longer. There was The Pill, pop art and pop music. Young people were shaking things up and wrestling the decade out of the hands of the establishment.
“It started and it was over before we knew it had started because we didn’t know what we were doing,” said Caine who is a Sir and has two Academy Awards to his credit. “Nobody said, ‘We’re going to change society,’ in great big speeches in Hyde Park corner. Nobody gave a toss about that. What we did is we got on with our lives as we thought we should.”
Not everyone thought that was a good plan. The film, which is currently showing at the Vancity Theatre, shows many bowler-wearing blokes bemoaning the new youthful order as the sign of a morally corrupt civilization.
The idea for My Generation came about during a dinner one night with mega producer and Caine pal Simon Fuller.
“Every now and then when we were having dinner or something I’d start talking about the ’60s,” said Caine. “One day he said, ‘You know all this stuff about the ’60s.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I know everything about the ’60s.’ He said, ‘Let’s make a movie’ and we did.”
The movie is very much told through Caine’s personal lens. This is not a deep dive into politics or the unpacking of other weighty social concerns. It is a love letter to a decade that created Brit cool and saw the children of the working class take over culture.
“My parents were in a society where they knew where they belonged and their position and they didn’t move out of it, you know,” said Caine.
“My mother was a Cockney cleaning lady and my father was a porter in Billingsgate Fish Market, you know. In tough terms: they knew their place. The unfortunate thing about me and my generation, we didn’t know our place because there wasn’t any place. We went where we were gonna go and we didn’t care what place it was.”
Songs from the Kinks, the Animals, the Rolling Stones and the Beatles play throughout the film. There are Caine-conducted voiceover interviews with such key players from the times as Paul McCartney, Marianne Faithfull, Roger Daltrey, David Bailey, Twiggy and Mary Quant.
While it is a decent chronicle of music, the David Batty-directed film shines brightest when it focuses on the flashy, eye-popping pop art and style worlds.
Suddenly being young and British meant you were a tastemaker.
People everywhere were taking note. Even Caine’s mother was curious about the changes. In the film, Caine tells the story about his mother asking him what a miniskirt was. Rather than describe one, he took her to the fashionable King ’s Road, where the young women were all in miniskirts.
“If it’s not for sale you shouldn’t put it in the window,” Caine says his mother said.
What led to the dramatic changes in literally every facet of life? Caine said the big shift came out of a collective need for some light to shine on what he describes in the film as a depressing 1950s England; an England he returned to after the Korean War to find was still in the midst of food rationing and suspended in coal smog.
“It was terrible, miserable. Then we get to the ’60s and (Nikita) Khrushchev says we now have the atom bomb and you’ve got four minutes to live, so my generation says, ‘We got four minutes to live, let’s have a good time’ and that’s how the ’60s started,” said Caine adding: “The ’60s for me I regard as the luckiest moment of my life. No one led the ’60s. No one talked about let’s do this and let’s do that. We just did it on our own and then found someone else who did it.”
One of the things Caine did was help change how people talked in movies. Forever the British films were populated with one poshspeaking character after another. Everyone it seemed went to Eton then Oxford.
“Everybody was very posh. You know, ‘Bunty is having a party, we are all going to the country for the weekend,’” said Caine in an accent that would make Lady Grantham feel at ease. “I was living in a place that was half-bombed out and full of gangsters and smog.”
He, of course, had to affect those accents early on, but by mid-decade Caine was bringing his Cockney out and in what can only be described as beautiful irony it’s that voice that has gone on to be one of the most recognizable voices in cinema.
Many actors worth their salt probably have a Caine impression they trot out at parties.
“I know, right,” said Caine when asked about his often-impersonated voice. “I saw Tom Hanks do me and he was smashing. He was really good.”
For the record, Hanks’ impression is his favourite.