Our odyssey through the work of Michael Caine reaches a grim nadir: the 1984 comedy Blame It On Rio. Brace yourselves, readers.
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) 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 Blame it on Rio lay ahead…
Directed by:
Stanley Donen (On The Town, Singin’ in the Rain, Seven Brides For Seven Brothers, Charade)
Tagline:
This had multiple taglines, starting innocuous enough but I became increasingly uneasy as they went on…
-A new tropical comedy.
-You can blame the night, blame the wine, blame the moon in her eyes, but when all else fails…you’d better…Blame it on Rio!
-She’s the hottest thing on the beach. She’s also his best friend’s daughter!
-What’s so funny about making love to your best friend’s daughter? Ask Michael Caine.*
*Some advice, if you do ever encounter Sir Michael, probably best you don’t ask him this. Or for his opinions on Brexit.
Other Featured Geezers:
Michelle Johnson as Jennifer Lyons, Joseph Bologna as Victor Lyons, Demi Moore as Nicole Hollis, Valerie Harper as Karen Hollis.
What’s it all about, Alfie?:
Caine plays Matthew Hollis, a meek middle-aged man facing marital troubles. His wife Karen (Valerie Harper) is taking a solo vacation to think things over while Matthew is off to Rio with his teenage daughter Nicole (Demi Moore), his soon to be divorced best friend Victor (Joseph Bolgona) and his daughter Jennifer (Michelle Johnson).
Seventeen year-old Jennifer has long had a crush on Matthew, and the happy-go-lucky nature of Rio – and the dirty mind of the screenwriter – means that now is the time to make her fantasy a reality. After a liaison on the beach in which Matthew succumbs to Jennifer’s charms (with very minimal resistance), Jennifer becomes even more obsessed, while Matthew desperately tries to break things off before Victor finds out. This all leads to many not particularly funny misunderstandings and a generally miserable time for all involved (especially those watching at home).
Caine-ness:
The first shot after the opening titles is Caine as Matthew talking directly to camera in a confessional – not apologising for taking part in this film (as he should) – but rather saying, “What happened, happened.”
If only he’d left it there and the credits rolled. Then nobody would have to feel complicit in this atrocity. Alas, this is just the start of the nightmare.
Caine uses his own accent, and thankfully the film doesn’t feel the need to explain why he’s English and everyone else is American. His hair is at its waviest and he has a cracking pair of almost comically oversized glasses. And here ends the positive things I have to say about him in this film.
I wouldn’t go as far as saying Caine gives a terrible performance, but it’s certainly not a good one. There also seems to be a whiff of embarrassment in the air (which could just be second-hand embarrassment on my part). I blame it mainly on him being miscast, or poorly directed, or a bit of both. Caine gives a fairly naturalistic and down-to-earth performance which doesn’t suit the material – it requires something broader and sleazier to distract from the fundamental ickiness of the film’s central conceit. There are plenty of problematic comedies that are still funny thanks to bravura comic performances, but we don’t get that here.
There’s one sequence where Caine’s performance is pitched at the right comic level, however. After his character’s slept with Jennifer on the beach, a stereotypically English couple he knows approaches to say hello. Matthew desperately shovels sand over his body to cover his modesty and then maintains affable small talk, arms behind his head and body piled in sand, while a naked Jennifer lies off to one side, fast asleep. It’s the only bit of farcical comedy that works.
Overall, there’s way too little farce for a film with this premise. There’s a tiny bit of sneaking around in apartments, a little bit of slapstick when Matthew stands on a lit candle, and a wacky misunderstanding when a maid walks in on Matthew (in his pants) and Victor, who are in a compromising position atop their bed, mid-fight.
For the most part the ‘comedy’ comes from hoary old jokes that Caine delivers the camera. One example: “My folks were married nearly 50 years. Never said a harsh word. Never said a kind word. They just didn’t speak”.
These little moments are a fun idea in theory, but feel like deleted scenes from a lesser Woody Allen movie (fittingly, the actual plot seems like it could be a deleted chapter from a Woody Allen biography).
I’m slightly disappointed that “It’s only an iguana!”, which Matthew says after Jennifer screams when encountering one, didn’t become one of Caine’s signature catchphrases. I’m going to keep using it in my impressions of him in the hope it will catch on. As should you. Don’t let my viewing of this film be in vain.
Caine-nections*: I couldn’t really find any prior connections, so at a stretch I’d say this continues the trend started with Caine’s previous film, The Jigsaw Man (1983), of him working with iconic directors (Dr No’s Terence Young in that case) doing truly awful penultimate films in the twilight of their once illustrious careers.
Stanley Donen directed several iconic musicals; On The Town (1949), Royal Wedding (1951) Singin’ In The Rain (1952), Seven Brides For Seven Brothers (1954) and Funny Face (1957) as well as a handful of other interesting films such as the excellent comic thriller Charade (1963) and the Peter Cook/Dudley Moore Faustian comedy Bedazzled (1967). For Blame it on Rio to be his penultimate movie is a real pity. (His film before this, the 1980 sci-fi thriller Saturn 3, was even more calamitous.)
Donen directed one more project, a TV movie called Love Letters (1999), after a break of over a decade. From the scant reviews I could find, it was fine, and so at least he went out on a slight step up from Blame It On Rio.
Also, Caine carries on the Russian fitness regime that he learned in The Jigsaw Man by doing a couple of strained push ups in this one.
Caine would go on to work with Demi Moore again in 2007’s Flawless. I haven’t yet seen it, but I imagine the title might not be wholly accurate. Watch this space.
*I’m only counting from Caine’s first starring role in Zulu onwards.
Best Non-Caine Actor:
Outside of Caine, the biggest name for current day audiences is a pre-superstardom Demi Moore in the small role of Nicole, Matthew’s daughter. At this stage in her career, she was mostly known for her part in the US daytime soap General Hospital, and had her first major starring film role the previous year in the Charles Band-directed horror B-movie Parasite (definitely not to be confused with Bong Joon-ho’s film of the same name). Blame It On Rio was her first big Hollywood production, followed the year after by St. Elmo’s Fire (1985) which properly kicked off her movie career.
Moore recently provided a barnstorming performance in this year’s The Substance. In Blame it on Rio, she mostly elicits indifference, but that’s not her fault as she’s barely in it. She’s only required to occasionally pop up, look disappointed in her dirty old dad, and then disappear again for long stretches of time.
The rest of the cast comprises actors I was unfamiliar with. The second lead is Michelle Johnson and the third lead are her striking eyebrows. She does a good enough job of playing a sweet and naïve lovesick teen, who still has braces and sleeps with a Winnie the Pooh teddy (to make everything that happens in the film even more creepy), but that’s probably helped by the fact that this is exactly what she was.
I can’t vouch entirely for the veracity as it was on IMDb trivia, but apparently Johnson said that it wasn’t until after she was cast that she learnt that the role included total nudity, which she and her parents were concerned about, but she went ahead with it because she wanted a movie career and was reassured by Stanley Donen’s past filmography.
Already feeling uncomfortable with how the character was exploited on screen, it makes it even worse to then realise the young actress was exploited for a film that was definitely not worth it. Sadly, Johnson didn’t then go on to have a particularly high-profile film career. A recurring role in The Love Boat, small parts in Death Becomes Her and Far And Away (both 1992), and being murdered on an episode of Murder She Wrote were among the peaks. Worst of all, as if she hadn’t already suffered enough for her art, she went on to play Steven Seagal’s wife in The Glimmer Man (1996).
Rounding out the main cast is Joseph Bologna as Victor, whose Aunt Pauline apparently chastised him for starring in this film because of the nudity. His two biggest films of note were Lovers And Other Strangers (1970) and My Favorite Year (1982) both of which I hadn’t previously heard of. I didn’t enjoy his performance here – he played it too straight and his character is simply unlikeable. He also has no chemistry with Caine, who’s meant to be his best friend. It’s a blow to the film, because it arguably needs two charismatic actors who enjoy hanging out in Rio (just imagine Sean Connery in the Victor role). Sadly, we don’t even get that.
I’m not going to give you any context for this screenshot, mainly because I was not even sure when I was watching it, answers on a postcard;
My Bleedin’ Thoughts:
You can’t just go around blaming everything on Rio. All involved need to take some personal responsibility for creating this abomination.
This is an adaptation of a French movie titled Un moment d’égarement (1977) which Stanley Donen, and his then wife Yvette Mimieux, watched and decided to adapt.
The terrible opening theme song is a great indicator of the horror to come. And don’t relax thinking that it’s the only time that you’ll have to hear it, as gluttons for punishment are treated to an encore of it accompanying the end credit montage of all the hilarious sex crimes you’ve just witnessed. It’s not even the worst song featured in the film – there’s one called Time Out with lyrics such as “time out, party time is waiting” that sound as though they were written on the spot.
With minimal effort this film could be re-edited into a psychological thriller about a man taking advantage of an obsessed and delusional teen. It would only take about two minutes to cut out the handful of functioning jokes – which leads onto the fact that this film simply isn’t funny. When it tries to do things that are creative, they end up simply being odd. For example, there’s a scene where Matthew, en route to Rio, looks out of the plane window and fantasises about women doing acrobatic dance routines on planes in black and white archive footage while an old-time song plays in the background.
I don’t think the men who made this film had met teenage girls before. That they’re happy to go topless on the beach in front of their dads, and frolic around in the sea with them, seems somewhat odd. Also, I have no idea what to make of the exchange when Jennifer says regarding Matthew, “I used to have a crush on him” and Nicole (Matthew’s daughter) responds in her husky Demi Moore voice “Me too.”
I tried to not think about it too much.
On a brighter note, there were way more monkeys than I anticipated in this film. Admittedly I anticipated no monkeys, but still, I find my positives where I can. There’s even a little monkey wearing a tux.
And that’s not all! The film is also chock full of birds. Many questions were raised watching this movie, but one of most pressing was, why are there so many birds just hanging out in their rented villa? If I booked this place on Airbnb and there were 10 random parrots there, I wouldn’t be best pleased. I’m not sure why they are all so casual about it.
One bird lays an egg as soon as they arrive. There’s also a bird sitting at a chair around the breakfast table, watching and judging. There’s even a load of framed portraits of parrots all over the gaff. I like parrots, but I think this is too much parrot content. And then when they go to a restaurant, there are also a ton of birds there, too, including a toucan and parrot just chilling!
This could be a prequel to Hitchcock’s The Birds where we are finally finding out what caused them to want to kill all humans: it was watching Blame It On Rio.
Trivia (courtesy of IMDB):
-Other considered titles were “I Love Rio”, “Love, Rio” and “Only in Rio.” They were really eager to hit that Rio angle.
-The original poster, of the rear view of an anonymous woman in a bikini, had to be airbrushed to make the bikini less revealing after it caused a stir (not a euphemism).
-Stanley Donen blamed production issues on Rio. Apparently, it was a nightmare because of excessive bureaucratic requirements for personal information on the cast and crew, endless rainfall and the non-arrival of goods and services.
Overall Thoughts:
One of Caine’s worst. Unfunny, uncomfortable, and embarrassing for all involved (even/especially the parrots).
Rating:
1/5 Parrots Who Should Be Ashamed of Themselves for Appearing in This
Where You Can Watch This:
If you’re a masochist, it is currently available to rent or purchase from most streaming services or on DVD and Blu-ray.
Up Next:
After watching this movie, I felt like I needed to take a shower. Maybe Caine did too as his next film is Water. It’s another comedy, but with Billy Connolly and Leonard Rossiter co-starring, so surely it must be better? Please make it so.
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