Starring Michael Caine

I got given this book for Christmas a couple of years ago, mainly because I go nuts for Michael Caine and I think he's the ducks guts when it comes to actors and all-round-smashing dudes. Ever since I first saw Zulu when I was about 12 I've always been impressed by his onscreen charm. In recent years I've managed to see a fair few more of his films, and the feeling hasn't dimmed.

Caine has roughly 100 films to his name, which is no mean feat. He's played working class spies, cockney womanisers, toff soldiers, gay playwrights, messed up cross-dressing serial killers, pot-smoking old hippies, brutal gangsters and alcoholic professors - employing a wide range of convincing accents, controlled body language and a whole lot of screen charisma. You might be forgiven for thinking I have an unhealthy love for Caine but I really do think he is one of the true treasures of 20th and 21st century pop culture.

This book takes us through all of his films up to around 2003, listing them in alphabetical order and affording each and every one a fairly measured space in the book. The author David Bishop gives us each film's plot, Caine's role in the film and how he came to get it, how he performed, how the critics saw his peformance, how the critics saw the film, how Caine saw the film and, at the end of each entry, what Bishop thinks of the film. It doesn't get much more indepth than that, and there isn't really much more that you could ask for.

Now, Caine has done his fair share of stinkers (you'd be hard-pressed to appear in 100 films without being in a few bombs), but he almost always gave a decent performance. For every Zulu, Get Carter, The Ipcress File, Alfie, The Italian Job, The Man Who Would Be King, Educating Rita, The Cider House Rules, The Quiet American, etc, there's also a Jaws 4, Beyond the Poseidon Adventure, The Swarm, Blame it on Rio or Ashanti. But on top of all that there's also rare information and quotes from Caine on his many hard-to-find films - including the mostly-unreleased The Debtors, an apparently dreadful comedy directed and financed by Randy Quaid's wife that saw the Quaids eventually file for bankruptcy.

Anyway, this is a must-have for any Michael Caine fans or diehard film fans in general.