(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Thu 6 November 2025 16:45, UK
Actors who’ve made less than half as many movies as Michael Caine have admitted they’ve got no interest in revisiting their past work, so why would a legend who starred in over 130 of them?
The most famous one of his own films that he’s never seen is undoubtedly Jaws: The Revenge, but it did buy his mother a nice house, which made up for Caine missing out on the chance to collect his first Academy Award in person because he was too busy picking up a fat paycheque for a shitty sequel.
Speaking of shitty flicks, the two-time Oscar winner has made plenty of those, too. It’s highly unlikely that he’d find himself stricken by the desperate desire to revisit Ashanti, The Swarm, or Beyond the Poseidon Adventure, but Caine doesn’t even want to sit back, relax, and rewatch the countless classics he appeared in.
That’s fair enough, because there’s no shame in constantly looking forward, but there always tends to be an exception to the rule. There’s only one credit in his entire back catalogue that he enjoys seeing again, and not only that, but he loves seeing it again and again and again, with Caine admitting that whenever he stumbles across it, he can’t help himself from being drawn into the story.
“I never look at anything,” he told Paul Fischer when asked if he ever perused his previous outings for a repeat viewing. “The only thing I ever look at, and I find myself, I get sucked into it, is Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. And, you know, I’m usually going through, and if I see Dr Schaffhoussen walking in, I think, ‘Wait a minute, I’ve got to look at this for a minute’. And then I’m stuck there.”
Frank Oz’s comedic two-hander, which teamed Caine up with Steve Martin in the tale of a career con artist who meets his match in the form of a direct competitor, has repeatedly been singled out by the Dark Knight trilogy and Italian Job star as the single funniest feature he’s ever been a part of.
It’s also one of Caine’s most cherished roles, and it turns out that it holds an even dearer place in his heart, since he acknowledged it as the one and only picture he would gladly watch in perpetuity. Is it the best movie he’s ever made? Nope. Was it the most successful? Also no. Clearly, though, the experience and his fondness for the end result have given it a unique distinction among the star’s pantheon.
There are at least a handful of films, and almost definitely a lot more based solely on how many he’s made, that Caine hasn’t seen once, never mind multiple times. And yet, if his wandering eye happens to catch Dirty Rotten Scoundrels playing anywhere at any time, he finds it completely and utterly irresistible.
If Michael Caine found himself locked in a room for the rest of his days and was asked to name which Michael Caine movie he wanted to spend his time with, then there would only be one choice.
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