Michael Caine, Bowie and more: David Bailey’s iconic pin-ups – in pictures

 

Jean Shrimpton, Vogue, 1965

David Bailey’s Changing Fashion celebrates the transformational impact of Bailey’s photography in the 60s and 70s. His studio was the perfect expression of his restless intelligence. Alongside the usual photographic clutter, you’ll find tribal masks, oriental boxes and stuffed animals – including several parrots. The studio becomes a portal to a private world to which only Bailey has the key. David Bailey’s Changing Fashion is at The MOP Foundation, A Coruña, Spain, until 14 September. All photographs: David Bailey

Paulene Stone, 1960

Before Bailey, models would sit or stand in the polished perfection of studio shoots. This playful image has the beginnings of a sense of bodily flow that became one of the hallmarks of Bailey’s work. He swiftly established a new vocabulary of body shape and gesture. His pared-down, graphically direct photographs brilliantly caught the brittle glamour of the 60s

Jean Shrimpton, Vogue, New York, 1962

In 1962, Bailey persuaded Vogue to let him take his first great muse, Jean Shrimpton, to New York for his first foreign assignment. The impact of the images they made there, crackling with life and attitude, was extraordinary. As Marit Allen, the editor of Vogue’s Young Idea section at the time, says: ‘Jean and Bailey in New York broke the ground for fashion as it was from them on. They turned the world upside down’

Paolo Sorrentino: ‘I never use a crude approach to showing the naked bodies of older people’

After winning an Oscar for The Great Beauty, the director had the pick of Hollywood for his next film, Youth. Why was he so keen on persuading the British veteran Michael Caine to step up?

Andrew Pulver
Friday 15 January 2016 08.10 GMT

F

rance has some of the toughest anti-smoking laws in Europe, but they don’t cut much ice with Paolo Sorrentino. Having taken over an upstairs bar in Paris’s St-Germain-des-Prés to hold court, the Oscar-winning film-maker is openly puffing on what can only be described as a stogie. Coupled with a pair of unexpectedly luxuriant sideburns, Sorrentino looks like he might have just staggered off the set of a Sam Peckinpah western – which, you suspect, is just how he would like it.

Youth: watch first trailer for new Paolo Sorrentino film with Michael Caine

Youth sees Caine as an ageing composer with mournful gaze and slicked-back hair in a trailer that comes on like Sorrentino’s previous film, The Great Beauty

Andrew Pulver
Monday 13 April 2015 16.27 BST

The Great Beauty (La Grande Bellezza) is a hard act to follow, what with its astonishing central performance from Toni Servillo (both ecstatic and world-weary) and wonderfully rendered images of a sublimely beautiful Rome. But director Paolo Sorrentino has got to try, and the trailer for his latest, Youth (La Giovinezza), has just emerged – shortly before it will, no doubt, appear in the lineup for Cannes (due to be announced on 16 April).

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So what do we make of Youth? We know the plot outline involves Michael Caine playing a semi-retired classical composer, and Harvey Keitel as his film-director pal, on holiday in the Alps; and that Caine gets a summons from the Queen of England for a final concert. The trailer majors on Caine, giving it the full Servillo with mournful gaze and slicked-back grey hair. His is the only dialogue we hear: “You are right. Music is all I understand.” We get glimpses of the cast’s other well-known faces: Rachel Weisz (prone, covered in mud); Keitel and lady companion; Paul Dano, with slightly improbable moustache.

Get Carter: No 7 best crime film of all time

Mike Hodges, 1971


Michael Hann
Sunday 17 October 2010 11.49 BST

A

t a distance of nearly 40 years, Get Carter has as much value as a piece of social history as it does as a thriller. The Tyneside it portrays isn't one of hen parties in Bigg Market, but of poverty that grinds Newcastle and its inhabitants into an inescapable and unendurable greyness. At times, too, it seems as if Mike Hodges has thrown his actors into real life – the faces of the old men in the pubs and betting shops, and the revellers at the dancehall take the movie into something akin to cinéma verité, even as mayhem erupts in the foreground.

As a thriller, though, it's colder and more brutal than anything British cinema has produced before or since; its mood so unyielding that the viewer does not even question whether Michael Caine really could be a Geordie hood returning home for his brother's funeral. There's humour, but it's so bleak it causes grimaces more than laughs: when the husband of Carter's lover (played by Britt Ekland) walks in on her having phone sex with Carter, he asks, puzzled: "What's the matter? You got gut trouble or something?" That's entirely fitting with regard to the subject matter, for when Carter investigates his brother's death, he discovers the dead man's daughter has been coerced into porn films by the local crime syndicate, setting Carter off on a trail of vengeance.

At the centre of it all is Caine, playing with such chilly authority that even his most geezerish moments – "You're a big man, but you're in bad shape. With me it's a full time job. Now behave yourself" – retain their threat, when a few years later they might have teetered over into self-parody. He's aided by a top-notch supporting cast, with the playwright John Osborne an unlikely but wholly convincing ganglord, and future Coronation Street mainstay Bryan Mosley as the hapless hanger-on Cliff Brumby, who makes one of British cinema's most notable exits, from the upper stories of the Trinity Square car park in Gateshead. 

Watching Get Carter now is like reading accounts of the first westerners to cross the Gobi desert: did this world ever exist, and in such recent times? It seems wholly remote from 21st-century Britain, even as its themes of coerced sex and utter amorality chime with contemporary fears.

THE GUARDIAN

Chinatown / The best crime film of all time

Touch of Evil / No 2 best crime film of all time

Vertigo / No 3 best crime film of all time

Badlands / No 4 best crime film of all time

Rashomon / No 5 best crime film of all time

Double Indemnity / No 6 best crime film of all time

Get Carter / No 7 best crime film of all time

Pulp Fiction / No 8 best crime film of all time

Hidden / No 9 best crime film of all time

Goodfellas / No 10 best crime film of all time

Bonnie and Clyde / No 11 best crime film of all time

The Conversation / No 12 best crime film of all time

The 50 best films of 2015 / Youth / 48

The 50 best films 

of 2015 

in the US  

No 48 

Youth

Youth review - age cannot wither Michael Caine, but Sorrentino could try harder

***

Michael Caine is excellent as a retired composer opposite Harvey Keitel and Jane Fonda in this strangely sweet-natured opera of pathos

Peter Bradshaw
Wednesday 20 May 2015 11.45 BST

P

aolo Sorrentino’s new movie set in a Swiss sanatorium is a diverting, minor work, tweaked up with funny ideas and images and visually as stylish as ever. There are brilliant flourishes here that could only have come from Sorrentino: superb swooping camera moves, grotesque faces and angular perspectives, and it always watchable. But it’s beset with Sorrentino’s occasional fanboy weakness for pop-star cameos — Paloma Faith appears here, playing herself and not earning her keep. Youth has a wan eloquence and elegance, though freighted with sentimentality and a strangely unearned and uninteresting macho-geriatric regret for lost time, lost film projects, lost love and all those beautiful women that you never got to sleep with. The title has literary resonances with Conrad and Tolstoy, but the youth evoked is mostly that of young women and young women’s bodies, whose allure never fades for men as they get older.

The Brand New Testament review – God's not dead, just useless, in a sweet and blasphemous satire

    

In Jaco van Dormael’s peppy, inventive comedy, everyone gets a text message from the Almighty, while “JC”’s sister gathers a gang of disciples

 

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It is all incarnated

It is all incarnated in Michael Caine, whose face here is an inscrutable mask of worldly disillusion, breaking occasionally into a droll smile: he plays retired British composer Fred Ballinger, currently fending off requests from the Palace to conduct a special Royal Command performance of his early masterpiece Simple Songs. (Fred is supposed to have been an intimate of Stravinsky’s — but this music sounds more like Britten pastiche.) He is undergoing a health check-up at this luxurious state-of-the-art sanatorium, although as he says: “At my age, getting in shape is a waste of time.”

Fred is there with his best buddy Mick (Harvey Keitel) an ageing movie director, here with his production team, brainstorming a new film set to star his old diva friend, played by Jane Fonda. Mick’s son is married to Fred’s daughter and assistant Leda (Rachel Weisz) who actually shares her dad’s bedroom. There is also an LA movie actor Boyle (Paul Dano), another sufferer from that popular condition: self-congratulatory cynicism, who is preparing for a certain historical role, and astonishes everyone at the spa by appearing one morning in full costume and makeup. The two old guys, Mick and Fred, go into a kind of arthouse version of Statler and Waldorf, and they stroll around the grounds, grumping away, torturing themselves by whingeing about their prostate worries and perving over the current Miss Universe (Madalina Diana Ghenea) who has won a stay here as part of her prize and turns out to be smarter than anyone thought.

There has already been much comment online to the effect that Caine is playing the kind of role that might otherwise have gone to Sorrentino’s longtime collaborator Toni Servillo, and it’s true that Caine’s air of sticken ennui does remind you of Servillo. But actually Caine is very good in the role, he brings something different, a distant fatherly charm.

If only the film was not so (mostly) marooned in that single location. When the action cuts to memories and fantasies of Venice, where Fred conducted an orchestra, the film suddenly comes alive with power and movement: there is a stunning tableau of St Mark’s Square underwater. Even a very quick scene with Jane Fonda losing her temper on a plane frees things up a bit: but mostly we are drifting around the handsome facilities and grounds of this sumptuous but weirdly soulless open prison with its massages and its heated pools.

There is a poetic richness in Youth which occasionally emerges as Mick and Fred talk about what they can remember of their lives, and Mick’s realisation that there are huge stretches of his own life that he can simply no longer remember: his own youth is more or less a complete blank. It is an idea which is more terrifying than piquant: more disturbing, arguably, than anything Mastroianni’s director faced in 8 ½ — though he himself had youth more or less on his side.

Sorrentino has a basic level of fluency and verve. Anything that this film-maker places in front of his camera is always arresting to some extent: there is a superb shot in which Fred and Mick spy on an elderly couple having sex in a forest: a shot replete with comedy, absurdity and alienation. I am already looking forward to another more substantial Sorrentino film, though there is pathos here, and sweetness.

THE GUARDIAN