Is Water, a 1985 comedy from the writers of Porridge, a hidden gem in Michael Caine’s long film career? No.
Michael Caine showed no sign of slowing down as he entered his third decade as a leading man. The 1980s saw 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) whilst 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 Water lie ahead…
Directed by: Dick Clement (A Severed Head, Catch Me A Spy, Porridge, Bullshot)
Tagline: They’re All In It – Up To Their necks!
Other Featured Geezers: Valerie Perrine as Pamela Weintraub, Brenda Vaccaro as Dolores Thwaites, Leonard Rossiter as Sir Malcolm Leveridge, Billy Connolly as Delgado Fitzhugh, Dennis Dugan as Rob Waring, Fulton Mackay as Reverend Eric McNab, Fred Gwynne as Franklin Spender.
What’s it all about, Alfie?: Caine plays Baxter Thwaites, the laidback and happy-go-lucky governor of the similarly laidback and happy-go-lucky Caribbean island, and British colony, Cascara. Mostly ignored by the outside world, it is a peaceful and uneventful place, apart from occasional unsuccessful demonstrations by The Cascara Liberation Front, an organisation of two, led by Delgado Fitzhugh (Billy Connolly).
However, when an abandoned oil rig starts spouting natural mineral water, various groups are suddenly eager to exploit this rare find – including an American oil magnate, the British Government, and even Cuban guerrillas.
Caine-ness: Caine is top billed and appears within the first couple of minutes, emerging from behind a hedge smoking a joint while wearing a Hawaiian shirt and a baseball cap, starting as he means to go on. Instantly I clocked that this may not be a performance of great depth. I was proven correct.
Caine was first choice of the film’s writers, Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais. They needed a bankable star attached before HandMade Films would greenlight the project and Caine, who was a fan of the script, made it all happen. So, a suitable alternate title for this movie would be ‘Blame It On Michael’.
Thwaites is paper thin as a character. He seemingly has no wants or needs other than liking to chill out and have a smoke (and wanting to carry on doing that for as long as humanly possible). There’s no significant character development or emotional twists or turns, he’s uncomplicatedly affable and laidback throughout. The main joke with his character is that he’s a governor but he doesn’t look or act like one (visiting activist Pamela mistakes him for one of the removal men).
Caine isn’t bad, but he doesn’t have anything to work with, and sleepwalks through the film. It’s better than his last dodgy comedy, Blame It On Rio, because at least this time he doesn’t appear embarrassed to the core and isn’t constantly teetering on the edge of committing a sex crime. And we get a scene in Water where Caine briefly goes a bit John Rambo, brandishing a gun and decked out with a bandolier, which is something.
So, you may wonder, what was it exactly that Caine saw in the flimsy script that so excited him? I have an inkling that “location filming in the Caribbean” may have been what did the trick. This is a film where it appears that they had a much better time making it than people had watching it.
Caine-nections*: The director of photography Douglas Slocombe, best known for his work on the original Indiana Jones trilogy and many of the most beloved Ealing comedies, also worked on two previous Caine movies; the excellent The Italian Job (1969) and the not so excellent The Marseille Contract (1974). By the 1980s he was getting on in years, and his eyesight was suffering, and so he only worked on two more films after Water, 1986’s Lady Jane and 1989’s Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade. Now, if you want to end your career with a flourish, that’s how you do it. It certainly made up for his involvement in Water.
Leonard Rossiter had previously crossed paths with Caine in two Bryan Forbes directed movies; Deadfall (1968) and The Wrong Box (1966)
In Water, Maureen Lipman plays Margaret Thatcher as a penknife-throwing ice queen, which is very different from her memorable supporting role as a mentally fragile bohemian in Educating Rita (1983). A character I can’t imagine the Iron Lady approving of.
Just a few years prior, in 1983’s The Honorary Consul, Caine played another laidback British diplomat in a far-flung tropical country who accidentally gets kidnapped by rebels. Talk about typecasting!
*I’m only counting from Caine’s first starring role in Zulu onwards.
Best Non-Caine Actor: This film is chocked full of surprising faces in oddball supporting roles including:
-The aforementioned Maureen Lipman as Margaret Thatcher. The vocal impression is good but visually the similarities are not quite there, which I imagine Maureen would be pleased to hear.
-Lex Luthor’s girlfriend from 1978’s Superman, Valerie Perrine, as an environmental activist.
-Clement and La Frenais’ Porridge buddy Fulton Mackay as a boozy priest who is singlehandedly helping to repopulate the island.
–The Producers’ Dick Shawn as an egotistical actor who, owing to a ghastly white mop of hair, reminds me of a cross between Richard Burton and my late Nan.
-Alfred Molina as Pierre, a French mercenary who, mid invasion of Cascara, stops to read out a gourmet menu of emergency rations which include a robust wine.
-Leonard Rossiter, in his final film appearance, released the year after he passed away, playing the typical sleazy Leonard Rossiter type. He is therefore very good fun.
-Fred Gwynne as a stereotypical Stetson-wearing oil tycoon.
-Dennis Dugan, who is best known for directing a string of Adam Sandler movies including Happy Gilmore, Big Daddy and Grown Ups, as an oil company employee.
-Ruby Wax as a business executive who doesn’t get anything funny to do and is just there.
However, this revolving cavalcade of amusingly mismatched stars don’t make up for the two incredibly annoying performances that cast a pall over the film.
Billy Connolly is a hit and miss actor, and here he’s most definitely in the miss camp as “the singing rebel” Delgado Fitzhugh. He refuses to speak, and will only sing, until Cascara is free from British rule. Unfortunately, for us, his singing is absolutely dire. The tired and disdainful look that Thwaites gives as he tunelessly warbles in court “I don’t care, I don’t give a damn, British justice is a farce and a sham” is, I imagine, a look shared by much of the audience.
HandMade Films’ Denis O’Brien was a big fan of Connolly and had previously been instrumental in casting him in Clement’s previous film for the company, Bullshot. Connolly never seems at ease in this role and it certainly doesn’t suit his talents. It’s especially odd casting since his character is meant to be mixed-race.
At least Connolly stops singing in the last third of the film and so becomes slightly more bearable. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for Brenda Vaccaro, as Thwaites’ grating Guatemalan wife Dolores, who stays annoying throughout.
To end this section on a higher note, something that the film does have in abundance is a great array of supporting goats which I will now rank.
At number 3: The goat that chews Dolores’ dresses. That will show her!
At number 2: The goat in the background of a shot absolutely going to town on a discarded watermelon and having a lovely old time.
And number 1: The G.O.A.T goat is the diva who, when Caine is walking up a scenic hillside, stops immediately in front of him, deliberately trying to maximise its screentime, shamelessly staring into the camera pretending that it doesn’t know exactly what it’s doing as you see Caine gently trying to nudge it out of the way with his leg. Caine gives it a little scratch, then we cut to a medium close up of Caine and then when we cut to the long shot again the goat is gone. I imagine Clement cottoned on to its game and punted it off the hill.
Honourable mention: Leveridge says that Thwaites “Smells like a rancid goat”.
My Bleedin’ Thoughts: Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais are British TV comedy royalty, having created The Likely Lads and Porridge and written most episodes of Auf Wiedersehen Pet. However, despite many attempts, the medium of film has not been as good a fit for their talents.
Water was the sixth, and to-date final, theatrical feature directed by Clement which include a Kirk Douglas starring spy spoof (To Catch A Spy) and 1983’s not particularly timely parody of the 1920s pulp icon Bulldog Drummond (Bullshot), they were all released to mixed reviews and have since faded into obscurity apart from arguably the 1979 movie adaption of Porridge.
Water was produced by George Harrison and Denis O’Brien’s HandMade Films. In the documentary about that company, An Accidental Studio, Water‘s co-writer La Frenais mentions how the “idea for a film about a Caribbean island that discovers Perrier water […] all sounded terribly funny over a second bottle of wine.” This tipsy origin story explains a lot.
They both have since admitted their reservations, with Clement confessing that the script “doesn’t pull it off as a cohesive whole” and La Frenais elaborating that it wasn’t a tone that they were used to writing and, trying to do a bit of everything rather than really focusing on one element, they ended up falling short.
This would have been fine as a British TV movie, but as a theatrical release it feels like it’s stretching itself and I’m honestly surprised it got a cinema outing. The writing is sitcom-level stuff, with all the characters being one-dimensional stereotypes, and there’s the misguided assumption that people smoking marijuana is inherently hilarious.
One silly idea that I genuinely did like, however, was when the islanders perform the breaststroke during their national anthem, since they are descended from shipwreck victims, and then they do the backstroke because it’s “symbolic of all the different strokes that brought people here.” That was an amusing bit of worldbuilding.
A relief, considering the colonial setting, is that this film isn’t as problematic as it could have been. It is admittedly a bit condescending in its portrayal of the native islanders but never outright racist. Although, on the other hand, two separate characters do casually throw out homophobic slurs which, ahem, wasn’t so great.
The most interesting thing about the film is its music connection. George Harrison usually steered clear of being directly involved in HandMade Films’ productions but here, unwisely for his street cred, he made an exception and appears onscreen alongside Ringo Starr, Eric Clapton, Jon Lord and Ray Cooper as part of the “Concert for Cascara” performance at the end of the film at the United Nations. He does some half-arsed backing vocals, crooning “freedom” alongside Clapton, and hovers in the background behind Connolly, with the camera crew rightfully distracted as the framing keeps edging closer towards him. Harrison is also credited as a co-writer on the song Celebration that features on the soundtrack, sung by Jimmy Helms. No one is asking for these songs to be added to the All Things Must Pass deluxe LP re-release, and for good reason.
The majority of the rest of the soundtrack is Reggae music sung by Eddy Grant including, the title song, which is naff and repetitive but did get stuck in my head.
Trivia (Courtesy of IMDb): The island name’s Cascara was inspired by the plant Cascara which is said to have a slightly laxative effect.
Television presenter Paul Heiney got the role of a mercenary in as part of the BBC show In At The Deep End where he’d try out various jobs. He learnt a German accent for his character of Kessler but found out later that it was actually written as French. When looking for advice from Oliver Reed he was told to cut his curly hair cut as “villains have straight hair, idiots have curly hair.” Which is quite offensive to both the curly and the straight haired among us.
The tags for this movie on IMDb include “reference to Al Pacino” and “reference to Mahatma Gandhi” which for me are what I look for in a movie. It’s also not the only project on IMDb to have both these tags. In case you wondered, the others are And The Oscar Goes To, a 2014 TV documentary, and an episode of the animated 1990s sitcom The Critic. Just in case you wanted to hold a very specifically themed night-in.
Overall Thoughts: Not offensively bad like Blame It On Rio, but mostly dull and dated, and a waste of the considerable talent involved, both in front and behind the camera. At least Caine got a nice holiday out of it.
Rating: 2/5 Goats
Where You Can Watch This: In the UK this is currently only available to purchase digitally through Prime Video (and is a poor-quality SD print).
Up Next: To carry on the spirit of this festive season, Caine plays Noel. Sadly, not Edmonds, but Noel Holcroft in The Holcroft Covenant.
