The 1980s films of Michael Caine: Half Moon Street (1986)

Our look back through the work of Michael Caine brings us to the 1986 thriller, Half Moon Street, co-starring Sigourney Weaver.

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Michael Caine showed no sign of slowing down as he entered his third decade as a leading man. The 1980s would see him win his first Academy Award (Hannah And Her Sisters), tackle new genres such as horror (The Hand) and shark-based revenge movie (Jaws: The Revenge) while continuing to work with interesting new auteurs like Brian De Palma (Dressed To Kill) as well as old friends from classic Hollywood such as John Huston (Escape To Victory). 

Film by film, I’ll be taking a look at Caine’s 1980s filmography to see what hidden gems I can unearth alongside the more familiar classics…

Spoilers for Half Moon Street lay ahead…

Directed by: Bob Swaim (La Balance, Masquerade, The Climb) 

Other Featured Geezers: Sigourney Weaver as Dr Lauren Slaughter, Patrick Kavanagh as General Sir George Newhouse, Nadim Sawalha as Karim Hatami, Ram John Holder as Lindsay Walker. 

Tagline: They would use her mind, her body and sacrifice her life to kill him. 

What’s it all about, Alfie?: Sigourney Weaver plays the misleadingly sinister sounding Dr Slaughter, an American academic living in London working at the Institute for Middle Eastern Strategic Studies. She loves her career but is struggling on her measly wages and so, instead of having fewer coffees at Pret, she starts a side hustle as an escort.

Through this she meets Lord Bulbeck (Michael Caine), a renowned international lawyer recruited by the government as an impartial negotiator for Middle Eastern disputes. They soon strike up a relationship that goes deeper than the physical, but boundaries eventually become crossed and jealousies invoked. And has an outside force deliberately brought them together? 

The Half Moon Street of the title is the location of the flat that Lauren is given by a suspiciously generous client. The film also features a few half-moons from the cast in the bedroom scenes.

Caine-ness: Sigourney Weaver is the lead, and first billed in the opening credits, but her name is immediately followed with “And Michael Caine”. It’s Caine’s second “and” credit in a row, but he gets significantly more screentime, and is the second lead after Weaver, compared to his purely supporting role in Mona Lisa.

Caine plays Lord Bulbeck, “Britain’s leading expert on Middle Eastern affairs” as we are told during the news report that introduces him five minutes into the film. It’s unclear how he earned this impressive moniker, but I assume it’s from winning Mastermind with this as his specialist subject.

Bulbeck has been personally asked by the PM to work as an impartial negotiator in a current Middle East crisis. We also later learn that he’s a widower whose wife was tragically killed in an accident in Turkey and, perhaps less importantly, his father once owned part of a greyhound. Which part of this poor greyhound is left unsaid. 

In private, Bulbeck is not as buttoned-up as you might assume, and uses escort services for female company. He also enjoys retiring to the kitchen to down milk straight from the bottle post-coitus, but that’s neither here nor there. I just wanted to mention it so I could include this screenshot:

We properly see Bulbeck 21 minutes into the film, sporting a healthy moustache and a cosy white cardigan, opening the front door of a fancy house that Lauren has arrived at. He’s her new client. 

Bulbeck and Lauren (and Caine and Weaver) instantly have an easy-going on-screen rapport, both gently playful. “How exotic!” he says after hearing her American accent. They clock that they’re on the same level intellectually when Lauren immediately identifies the pseudonym he uses, “Sam Weller”, as a character from Dicken’s The Pickwick Papers. 

This becomes an intensely deep relationship likely borne out of their similar taste in knitwear; jumper game recognise jumper game as they say.

They’re soon chatting intimately about their eclectic globetrotting pasts. “Tell me about your Chinese lover,” Bulbeck asks, which sadly didn’t become a signature catchphrase like “My name is Michael Caine” or “You’re only supposed to blow the bloody doors off”.

Lauren finds a framed photo of a young Bulbeck at a protest march. “When did you stop being a radical?” she asks; “I like to think I still am” he responds. His aforementioned cosy cardigans say differently.

The morning after, Bulbeck makes breakfast, whisking eggs and tenderly placing omelettes on their plates. Caine and Weaver sell this all as genuine moments of connection between two serious-minded individuals. It also made me really want an omelette. 

He may be a lord, but this isn’t posho Zulu Caine, since Bulbeck is from a working-class background. This character is Caine back in familiar territory, playing a somewhat roguish charmer with ultimately a good heart. This follows his excellently odious turn as a despicable wrong-un in Mona Lisa. It’s the warm and easy-going performance we so often see from Caine, and he plays it well.

Half Moon Street livens up whenever Caine and Weaver are on-screen together, and his performance elevates what is a somewhat shaky film to being more watchable.

Caine-nections*: This is the second film, after Mona Lisa, starring Caine released in 1986 that features a main character who’s a London-based sex worker. It’s a similar situation to the 1998 summer of A Bugs Life and Antz.

Also, in both this and Mona Lisa, part of the film takes place during the birthday of Caine’s character.

Keith Buckley, who plays Hugo Van Arkady, was in The Eagle Has Landed (1976) as Hauptmann Gericke. Donald Pickering, who plays George Hardcastle, was in A Bridge Too Far (1977) as Lt Col Mackenzie. 

Sigourney Weaver, alongside Jeff Bridges, was the presenter of the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor at the 1986 Oscars. Caine won for Hannah and her Sisters. 

*I’m only counting from Caine’s first starring role in Zulu onwards.

Best Non-Caine Actor: Sigourney Weaver is great whenever alongside Caine, but otherwise less so, in a performance that I found occasionally stilted and overly mannered. She also has very big 1980s hair that looks like a hairy Tetris T-Block has been dropped on her noggin. 

I found Lauren annoying throughout, and it certainly doesn’t help that the writing of her character, and her lines, are often blunt and cringeworthy. This film, and the original novel, was created by middle-aged men in the 1980s who, although they clearly had good progressive intentions, were still unfortunately middle-aged men in the 1980s.  

Their idea of a strong empowered woman seems to be a know-it-all with almost superhuman intellect and no imperfections or self-doubt. Lauren is a vegetarian non-smoker (and she likes you to know it), has a PHD (and in case you have any doubt that she’s clever, she wears big glasses), and seemingly knows literally every single thing there is to know about every single subject. There’s a montage of her going for meals with men of different nationalities and we see that she knows French and Japanese and likes putting these men in their place. She can also quote the Marx Brothers and John Huston films. 

This is the only performance by Weaver that I haven’t enjoyed, and so I will lay it squarely on the dodgy script. She gets to say such clangers as, “Don’t put walls around me. China was full of walls. I’m sick of them.”

Lines openly stating the bleedin’ obvious thesis of the movie such as, “The men that I see don’t want a woman, they want an object,” and some painfully tone-deaf banter with her black landlord whom she jokingly tells, “You’ll have another Notting Hill riot on your hands. A white one!” after she has issues with the plumbing. 

In contrast to Weaver, Nadim Sawalha’s performance as Karim Hatami was a highlight. He’s Lauren’s avuncular-seeming client who likes to make love with VHS tapes of Beat The Devil on in the background, and gets his kicks by photographing Lauren riding an exercise bike topless while asking her classic film trivia questions. (To be fair, who hasn’t done that with their significant other over a quiet bank holiday weekend.)

He’s funny and lovable in the first half of the film, but it turns out that he’s actually been manipulating Lauren and spying on her flat, with the intention of ultimately killing her and Bulbeck and thus tarnishing Bulbeck’s reputation. After this reveal he becomes genuinely quite threatening and sinister.

It’s a juicy role for Sawalha, who’s given the chance to properly act after so often being cast simply as a glorified extra in roles such as “Egyptian Tavern Owner” in Young Sherlock Holmes, “An airline representative” in Vampira and “Chairman of the Oil Producers’ Conference” in Sweeney!.

My Bleedin’ Thoughts: Looking ahead at Caine’s filmography, Half Moon Street was always an ominous cloud on the horizon. It’s the double whammy of a film I’d never heard of and bearing all the  hallmarks of a self-important drama. 

Happily, this film was actually better than I anticipated, but admittedly that isn’t saying much. Mercifully – and maybe this is why I was ultimately so kindly disposed towards it – it’s only 85 minutes long.

Half Moon Street is based on a 1984 novel by Paul Theroux (father of Louis), called Doctor Slaughter. Doctor Slaughter is perhaps one of literature’s most misleading titles since it sounds like a lesser video nasty or a straight-to-Tubi Eric Roberts vehicle. It is very much neither of those things.

This was also the first English language feature from director Bob Swaim. Swaim was an American who had started his filmmaking career in France where he’d enjoyed critical and commercial success. According to his definitely reliable Wikipedia page that he certainly hasn’t personally edited, his movie La Balance (1982), “was not only one of the biggest box office successes in the history of French cinema, but it also changed the face of the French police film.” Ooh la la, what a claim.

In spite of this film’s flaws, there is clearly talent behind the camera. It’s often atmospherically shot, especially the nighttime montages of Lauren in taxis gazing out at the neon lights of London.

Half Moon Street could be classed as an erotic thriller, but it’s not particularly salacious. Yes, there are a few nude scenes (which the IMDB users who input the key words are keen for you to know about) but they don’t feel particularly gratuitous or exploitative. 

The film’s major issue is that it doesn’t seem to know what type of film it is. Although Caine and Weaver sell the romance, it’s overall not romantic enough, and too sterile, to be an emotionally affecting drama. It’s not sexy or titillating enough to be a true erotic thriller. It’s too patronising and blunt to be a message movie about independent 1980s women. And the thriller elements don’t properly kick in until the final third. 

Unsurprisingly, it didn’t make much of a critical or commercial impact on its release, but Roger Ebert gave it a mostly positive review while also criticising the ending. Philistine that I am, I conversely was most engaged by the climax, which became more of a standard thriller, with the attack in Lauren’s apartment and Bulbeck edging unawares towards his doom. Compared to whatever the hell that preceding 45 minutes was trying to be, the finale was tense and efficiently executed.

The last scene is so brazenly cheesy I enjoyed it in spite of my better instincts. After their dramatic near-death ordeal, Lauren takes a cigarette out of Bulbeck’s mouth. “Trying to save my life again? You’re incorrigible Dr Slaughter,” he jokes. Cut to credits. 

Trivia (Courtesy of IMDB): When this was reviewed by Joel Siegel, on WABC-TV Eyewitness News, in September 1986, a few seconds of a clip of Weaver topless on an exercise bike were accidentally shown. Yeah, an “accident.” I know your game, Siegel. 

This is the movie debut of Janet McTeer, who played Van Arkady’s Secretary. I couldn’t quite tell but I think this is her in the screenshot below. If so, she is overshadowed, quite literally, by her impressive fringe. 

There is a photo of Weaver and her real-life father, Sylvester L Weaver Jr, next to Lauren’s answering machine. 

Production on this ran behind which left Weaver with only a couple of days off before starting her work on Aliens. 

Overall Thoughts: It never makes its mind up what kind of film it ultimately wants to be. But Caine and Weaver have enough chemistry that this is seriously flawed yet watchable. It’s an interesting failure. 

Rating: 2.5/5 Parts of a greyhound owned by Bulbeck’s Dad.

Where You Can Watch This: This is currently unavailable to watch digitally in the UK and is out of print on physical media.  However, this is a 20th Century Fox title, so it may end up on Disney + when Dr Slaughter inevitably joins the Avengers after they’ve run out of other characters.  

Up Next: It’s the British spy thriller The Whistle Blower and, in what might be his most challenging role to date, Caine plays Nigel Havers’ dad.