Our journey through Michael Caine’s 80s work reaches one of his best: Educating Rita, co-starring a powerhouse Julie Walters in the title role.
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 Educating Rita ahead…
Directed by: Lewis Gilbert (Sink The Bismarck!, Alfie, You Only Live Twice, The Spy Who Loved Me, Moonraker, Shirley Valentine)
Tagline: Frank Bryant is a professor of literature. And Rita is his newest student. A hairdresser who thinks Macbeth runs the local pub. And Hamlet is a plate of eggs with cheese. He’s a failed writer who has given up on his life. She’s determined to change hers by getting an education. And the more she loves to learn. The more he learns to love.*
*Not the punchiest of taglines – it doesn’t naturally roll off your tongue – but it’s an accurate description of the film and a tad more informative than one of the film’s alternate lines: “From the writer of Shirley Valentine.”
Other Featured Geezers: Julie Walters as Susan ‘Rita’ White, Maureen Lipman as Trish, Michael Williams as Brian.
What’s it all about, Alfie?: A reworking of Pygmalion, based on the play by Willy Russell, Educating Rita is the story of a young working-class hairdresser Susan ‘Rita’ White (Julie Walters) who has grown dissatisfied with her lot in life and dreams of something better. She’s 26 and under pressure to have a baby, but she’s determined to find herself first, and so undertakes an Open University course in literature where she meets the cynical alcoholic professor Frank Bryant (Michael Caine). Under his tutelage, Rita finds a new self-confidence which in turn enriches the life of the jaded professor.
Caine-ness: Caine re-teams with Lewis Gilbert, who directed him to his first Oscar nomination in 1966’s career defining Alfie. Here, Caine delivers another Oscar-nominated performance as alcoholic tutor Frank. While nowhere near as iconic as Alfie, his performance here is one of my favourites, showing that Gilbert clearly knew how to best use his leading man (but not his leading pigeons, as anyone who saw that pigeon do a double take in Moonraker can attest).
Caine is in the first shot, walking down the street, with a bushy beard (Rita later describes him as looking like a “geriatric hippy”). He’s strolling around his university campus, greeting students and faculty members, and generally seeming like an affable, happy chap. But before the opening’s over, we get a glimpse of a more complicated man. When Frank goes into his office, he produces a bottle of booze hidden behind The Lost Weekend on his bookshelf (he has a morbid sense of literature-based humour).
Frank’s aptly summed up by Rita when she tells him why she wants him as her tutor; “You’re a crazy mad piss artist who wants to throw his students through the window. I like ya!” And I like him too. Caine brings great warmth and charm to a deeply flawed and frustratingly self-destructive character (of course helped by Russell’s excellent script which he adapted from his own stage play).
This is a refreshingly understated and sympathetic portrayal of an addict. Even Frank’s drunken set pieces are not as broad or melodramatic as they could be; they’re amusing but tinged with sadness as we see Frank unable to stop himself from self-sabotaging. I found Caine’s drunk acting believable and pitched at the right level.
The big one is when he comes into a lecture late, visibly drunk, stumbles onto the stage and opens his speech with a hiccup before proceeding to fall off the stage (which looks like a brutal fall) and onto one of the student’s desks (“I may have fallen off, but I went down talking”).
The other is when he ends the night stumbling around campus (after some peak disco dad dancing) and wakes the bursar up by shouting outside his window asking him if he wants to join him for a drink, has his offer turned down, and so decides to settle down for a sleep on the lawn instead.
Frank isn’t an aggressive or antagonistic drunk – there’s a bit of shouty, pointy Caine acting but not much – he’s only ever really harming himself. He’s a frustrated former poet (he says that his best poetry was about the early days of the romance with his ex-wife: “She left me for the good of literature”). He’s clearly deeply self-loathing, but mostly either affable or indifferent to those who cross his path. He recognises what he’s doing to himself but makes jokes out of it (“Are you drunk?”, a student asks him during a seminar, “Of course I’m drunk. You don’t really expect me to teach this while I’m sober,” he replies).
He isn’t given an elaborately tragic backstory to justify his addiction, which makes it all the more relatable; there isn’t a simple fix for him to beat his demons. Rita assumes that the more optimistic Frank we get towards the middle of the film would have packed in the boozing, and so she’s dismayed to find he’s still hiding alcohol. When told that he’s got so much going for him, Frank says, “It’s because I’ve got so much going for me that I do it. Life is such a rich and frantic world that I need the drink to help me step delicately through it.”
Throughout, Frank seems emotionally numb in his interactions with others. After finding out that his partner Julia is leaving him for a colleague (played by Judi Dench’s late husband Michael Williams) Frank simply congratulates him and calmly says to her, “better luck next time Julia” before going off to get a bit more drunk. It’s only his connection with Rita that awakens significant emotions in him, even though his love for her is purely platonic on her end.
After Rita bails out of going to Frank’s dinner party, explaining that she felt like she would be made fun of, Frank is visibly hurt and emotional for the first time, with Caine doing some great, subtle acting, when he snaps, “If you think you were just invited to be laughed at, you can get out now.”
Sadly, we don’t end the film with Frank fully reformed, but with him on the way to his enforced sabbatical in Australia with his new haircut. There’s at least some hope that Frank can now make a better life for himself as Rita herself has done.
Caine is truly excellent in this role, and more deserving of an Oscar here than for Hannah And Her Sisters, for which he’ll win his first Academy Award in a few years’ time. His The Eagle Has Landed co-star Robert Duvall won Best Actor in 1983 for the film Tender Mercies. I haven’t seen that movie, but I just Googled it and Duvall has a much less impressive beard than Caine’s in Educating Rita, and for that reason alone I’d argue he didn’t deserve the win.
The Caine Signature Drunk Look:
Caine demonstrates the perfect style choices to pull off the affable drunk look. Notice the half-tucked shirt with one side dangling below the waist.
Caine-nections*: Lewis Gilbert also directed Alfie (1966).
So far this decade, and only six films in, Caine has already twice played writers of questionable talent who teach seminars in Deathtrap (1982) and The Hand (1981). In Educating Rita, he’s promoted to a full-time university professor of English literature. As far as we know, Frank isn’t a murderer, unlike those other two characters, so if I had to take one of these courses I’d opt for his.
Rita mentions that a customer she’s left alone too long in her salon will come out “looking like a Muppet”, which is foreshadowing for Caine’s greatest movie, The Muppet Christmas Carol.
As a drunken Frank is being helped out of the lecture hall he says, “Not many people know that”, which is a variation of the catchphrase falsely attributed to Caine but which actually comes from an impression that Peter Sellers did of him.
*I’m only counting from Caine’s first starring role in Zulu onwards.
Best Non-Caine Actor: When we first see Rita walking around campus she already stands out, with the pink streaks in her hair and the little subtle comedy stumble she does as she walks away from the camera. She’s wearing a pink and white striped dress like the paper bags you get for pick n’ mix in cinemas.
It won’t surprise anyone to say that Walters is excellent (she was nominated for Best Actress at the Academy Awards for her role), but it might surprise you to hear that this was her first feature film. At this stage in her career, Walters was best known for her appearances on stage and television alongside Victoria Wood, and for her role in Alan Bleasdale’s Boys From The Blackstuff.
Walters had previously played Rita in the original 1980 run of the stage play but apparently American producers wanted Dolly Parton for the role in the movie. Now I’m not one to say anything bad about Saint Dolly, but that would have likely led to a much broader film, whereas Walters adds a grittiness and a believability (and of course the comedy comes naturally for her), and so it’s a relief that the filmmakers opted for her.
Walters, and by natural extension the character of Rita, is a force of nature. Rita stands up for herself immediately by disparaging Frank’s door maintenance and his “stupid bleeding handle” – she’s certainly not the meek fish out of water type you might have initially assumed. She soon wins over an initially dismissive Frank with a treatise on swearing and class, and Rita also seems to take an instant shine to Frank: “I don’t often get a chance to talk to someone like you,” she confesses.
What follows are plenty of witty literature-based misunderstandings (“Howards End” “Sounds filthy!” “Do you know Yeats?” “The Wine Lodge?”) and Rita bringing her no-nonsense insight to the stuffy academic world. In answer to an essay question on how to get around the staging issues of Peer Gynt she says, “Do it on the radio” and her big takeaway from her first theatre trip to see Macbeth is “Wasn’t his wife a cow”.
Walters does a fantastic job of conveying the changing Rita as her confidence blossoms. She also has a good go at sledgehammering a wall. Rita (and Walters) can do anything.
The film belongs to Caine and Walters, but Maureen Lipman has a small yet memorable turn as Rita’s flatmate Trish, who appears on screen dressed like Keith Richards or one of the animatronics from Disneyworld’s Pirates Of The Caribbean ride. Her first words are, “Wouldn’t you just die without Mahler?” as she has the composer’s work blasting loudly out of her record player. She’s a mannered and snobbish eccentric who does “a bit of this, a bit of that” and is “running a bistro for a friend at the moment”.
What seems at first to be merely a comic side character is revealed to be more fully rounded and tragic later in the film.
My Bleedin’ Thoughts: Other than Alfie, I was most familiar with director Lewis Gilbert from his three Bond films (You Only Live Twice, The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker). This much more grounded film seems quite the change of pace, although he still gets to flex the sense of humour shown in those Bonds. Obviously happy with how the film turned out, Gilbert later went on to successfully adapt another play by Willy Russell: 1989’s Shirley Valentine which led to an Academy Award nomination for its star Pauline Collins (he could get his actors nominations but not wins, it would appear).
It isn’t surprising that this film is based on a play. There’s some nicely evocative location shooting but most of the key scenes take place in un-cinematic locations such as Frank’s office (where the play’s entirely set). The dialogue’s the element that really shines, as do the performances of Caine and Walters. They have great chemistry; the warm smiles that Frank gives Rita seem very real, and the snappy dialogue between them sparkles. Educating Rita might not be the most visually stunning of movies, then, but seeing these two national treasures act against each other is more than worth the price of admission.
One last thing to mention: the recurring, melodramatic synth music is somewhat overbearing. The first time it blares out is a bit of a shock, but I ultimately came to like it (perhaps through a case of audio Stockholm syndrome). There’s also quite a catchy pub song that was composed just for this film.
Trivia (Courtesy of IMDb): The University isn’t named but the film is meant to be set in the UK (the play’s set in Liverpool) but was mostly filmed in Dublin. At the train station there’s a black rectangle above the word ‘Platform’ where the Gaelic translation has been covered. Also, a double decker bus is seen with the destination of Beaumont, a real suburb of Dublin which has no Irish translation; most other destinations would have contained the bilingual Gaelic version, too, which is why the bus with this particular destination was used so the setting of the film could be kept vague.
Writer Willy Russell has a cameo as one of the wedding guests posing for a photograph outside the church.
When Rita cuts Frank’s hair, she puts her middle finger in the scissor’s finger hole and not the ring finger as is taught to professional hairdressers. This is why she lost the Oscar that year.
According to an anonymous IMDb contributor, Caine gained thirty pounds for this role. Caine has never been a method actor, so I’m not sure how much of this was intentional and how much of it was just being middle-aged, which makes this trivia seem somewhat unnecessarily catty.
Overall Thoughts: One of my favourite performances from Caine, alongside the scene-stealing cinematic debut of Julie Walters, this is a warm bittersweet comedy drama with a quotable and snappy script that still holds up 40 years later.
Rating: 5/5 Essay Questions About Staging Peer Gynt
Where You Can Watch This: This is currently available to watch for free on ITVX, or to purchase and rent through most other streaming services, as well as on DVD and Blu-ray.
Up Next: Ominously, it’s a film that I’ve never heard of, co-starring Richard Gere, called The Honorary Consul. Will it be Caine’s first proper stinker of the 1980s (even the dodgy ones I’ve at least found entertaining so far) or will it be a forgotten classic?
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