Richard Burton and Michael Caine - their parallel films explored

Michael Caine and Richard Burton - their 'parallel' film roles explored 

During the years 1965 - 76, Richard Burton and Michael Caine appeared in a number of films that followed similar themes. So, let's take a look at the similar but different outcomes. 

The spy that came in from the cold v Funeral in Berlin

A pair of interesting 1960's films to dissect - the 1965 Spy who came in from the cold was a real noir film starring Richard Burton, shot in monochrome which gave it added drabness and dramatic effect, versus Funeral in Berlin starring Michael Caine, a later 60's film shot in colour.

Cover for the DVD of The Spy who came in from the cold -

which was based on a John Le Carre story

Taking the spy film genre, we have two very different performances here - Richard Burton plays to the hilt a worn out and disillusioned Secret Service operator Alec Leamas, whose agents and contacts have being intercepted and knocked off with a too frequent regularity. He leaves the service to all intents and purposes and is pursued for what he knows. More than that you'll have to see the film to find out!

Burton being head hunted by Micheael Hordern's character Ash

Michael Caine's Funeral in Berlin sees his portrayal of Harry Palmer, a cockney wide boy / cashiered soldier pushed into espionage as an alternative to prison, is the other end of the scale. Palmer is detailed to assist a Russian Commander to defect to the West and pursues that agenda.

Richard Burton in Spy, gives a commanding performance as Alec Leamas, working with Claire Bloom (an actress he had appeared with before) and with a supporting cast of actors including Michael Hordern (later to work with Burton on Where Eagles dare, more on this later), Robert Hardy and various other well known faces of the time. It is a gritty performance and well worth watching and looking at the underpinning story that is going on in the film.

DVD cover for Funeral in Berlin

Michael Caine as the optimistic Palmer carries his film as the main performance, I didn't choose the Ipcress file as a comparison because 'Funeral' and Burton's 'Spy' were both centred on the Berlin connection.

The body move scene in Funeral

Unreconstructed war damaged East Berlin locations 

lent a lot of atmosphere to the story

Damaged Berlin shots are fascinating to look at in detail

From the earlier Ipcress file, with Gordon Jackson, 

Palmer is still unmistakeably as Palmer was

Michael Caine playing a more 'poppy' and upbeat performance than Burton's is a lighter viewing experience, but behind that bonhomie, Harry Palmer is a skilled operator in what was a dangerous game that some operatives did not get escape from.

Get Carter v Villain

Michael Caine in Get Carter

Richard Burton in Villain

A departure for both actors at the end of the 1960's decade was to come in their Gangster films. 

For Burton, he played very much against type as the lead character Vic Dakin, about as far away from his roots as could be imagined. Michael Caine did the same in his role in Get Carter.

Gritty old London - locations such as  Nine Elms here provide authenticity 
a lot of this area has now been redeveloped out of all proportion to this open look 

Both players displayed their talent to show us how they could play egomaniacal and psychopathic characters - roles they had not brought to the screen previously. 

Burton as Vic Dakin a London crime lord and homosexual, was about as far detached from Burton's real life persona or previous films as you could get, but he played it much like a Shakespearean tragedy, and although the film is in my view underrated, it is worth watching, the soft colour film stock adds something to the atmosphere.

Great camera angle work adds to the gravitas of the film

By the subject nature, there are moments of violence in it and you can see as the film progresses that the criminals have bitten off more than they can chew.

Colin Welland, Nigel Davenport and Ian McShane

Film poster for Villain

The violence in the film ensured an 18 certificate

Get Carter in context placed Michael Caine away from his London area and transplanted him to Newcastle, where he was seeking answers to who killed his brother. Like Villain, Caine is out of place and type, but he really brings his own talent to make the film work. 

The Lag's car of choice the Mk2 Jaguar featured in both of our comparison films

With Geraldine Moffat -  

the hard nut in the sharp suit was the new breed of top drawer criminal

The back street locations add to the film

Although Get Carter is favoured (as a better film than Villain), it has great theme music too, both films have their merits when you consider how the lead actors both played far away from their usual ground the end result is good. Many of these films are worth watching first for the actors and another time for the locations.

Where Eagles Dare v The Eagle has landed

Ingrid Pitt, Clint Eastwood, Mary Ure and Richard Burton

Michael Caine with fellow Luftwaffe invaders in the church scene

In our last comparison, we have Burton and Caine playing the part of special forces soldiers from opposing sides but in the uniform of the enemy side(mostly), with Burton as a British soldier impersonating a German and Caine as a German impersonating a Free Polish officer.

Where Eagles dare

A DVD cover for the film

In Where Eagles dare, Burton plays a similar in someways character to his Leamas in Spy, war weary and seen it all. 

Burton is to rescue an American Officer who the Germans have captured, who they believe holds vital military plans, when he is in reality a low ranking soldier who just looks like the officer he is meant to be. Burton has to snatch back the phoney officer before the Germans understand who he really is.

Michael Hordern was an ex- Naval man from WW2,  he had

previously acted with Burton in the spy who came in from the cold

The added complication is that there is a leak in the team sent on this job and Burton has to find out who it is in the team and where the leak comes from.

Again Michael Hordern pops up in a film with Burton, Hordern having been a naval officer during WW2. His immortal line 'Broadsword calling Danny Boy' lives on!

Burton calling 'Danny Boy', 

(Michael Hordern's radio call sign.)

Burton did see service in the RAF in 1943 to 1947, so he is playing against service type here in real life to a degree, but this experience lends itself to making his portrayal of a commander more realistic, he knew warfare from first hand experience.

Ingrid Pitt with Richard Burton during filming

It is quite a long film for the premise but well worth watching. Making her feature film debut is Ingrid Pitt (later to be a major Hammer films star), born in Poland in 1937 to a German born Russian father! Clint Eastwood in his pre Spaghetti western and Dirty Harry season plays an American Lt Schaeffer and Mary Ure gets billing on the poster, playing Burton's love interest.

Burton does tend as the main character to dominate the film, but he is the central role and he does nail this one.

The Graff and Stift bus used to get away in the close of the film.
It was later parked in a yard behind the Chertsey railway station in the early 70's

The Eagle has landed

The Eagle has landed Film poster

The premise of this film is that Michael Caine plays a Colonel Steiner of the Luftwaffe. His mission is to be landed in England and to eliminate Winston Churchill, who is staying at a large country house in Norfolk.

Still from the film

The twist is that Churchill is already somewhere else at a secret meeting, an actor has been drafted in to take Churchill's place. (This blends both of the films under comparison where the decoy is not what they are supposed to be in reality).

Michael Caine as Steiner, the Luftwaffe group leader

For Steiner's men, it is a fool's errand as the intended target is not where he is supposed to be, but they do not know that. 

Luftwaffe soldiers disguised as Free Polish soldiers -

the location is Mapledurham, Oxfordshire

The Eagle has landed is supposedly based on true events, of invasion. Indeed, this was said to be the case at a place in Suffolk called Shingle street, where it is believed that in 1940 German troops wearing British uniforms captured at Dunkirk, staged a daring commando raid to capture the Bawdsey radar station. They were foiled because Enigma traffic had been intercepted and the British knew exactly what was planned.

For the record, Michael Caine had seen active military service in Korea (as had Clint Eastwood) so they were able to play their roles with real experience to draw on in these films. 

A pair of good films here.

Overall we can see from the film comparisons of the two actors how they both came from similar impoverished backgrounds, changed their names and were very successful actors. 

Sadly for Richard Burton, he could have likely gone onto other successful film roles had he not died relatively early. His narration on the War of the Worlds album in 1974 is classic and fitted the bill perfectly. I doubt anyone else could have done this better. 

Michael Caine now Sir, has continued to make films and racked up decades of work for us to enjoy. One of his recent works Harry Brown, almost goes back into Get Carter territory and he comes across in interviews as someone unaffected by his fame.

Supergrass 25 years on - whey they resonated for their generation

Supergrass playing Alright on Top of the Pops

Supergrass - Alright?

I first saw Supergrass playing on Top of the Pops performing their son 'Alright', which curiously featured Danny Goffey and Mick Quinn swapping instrument roles on this one.

Gaz Coombes toting the Burns Hank Marvin greenburst guitar 

Immediately as a guitarist (and Shadows music player), I spotted the front man (Gaz Coombes) with a Burns Hank Marvin greenburst guitar (designed by Shadows guitarist Hank Marvin in 1963 - check him out!), as the reverby pub piano intro to 'Alright' played, the song was catchy, it resonated and still (just) in my 20's, I thought it sounded great. I still do.

Looking back to this about a quarter of a century later, it is still one of my favourite songs. I was thinking about why good bands are successful. I came to the conclusion that it was because they resonate with their audience.

The young Supergrass - 

if you were in a band with your schoolmates you just understood this

Oxford's Supergrass came along in the Brit Pop era, along with a roll call of bands including Oasis, Blur, Pulp and any other number of post rave music performers. As with the above bands, they all resonated with their (mostly) young audiences who were growing up and finding their music.

If you were in a band with your schoolmates (as they were in those just pre-internet days), you'd likely done the apprenticeship of the pubs and clubs scene as I had done about a dozen years earlier. They'd honed their act live in front of an audience, not in the bedroom in front of the mirror. They weren't manufactured, they were doing their thing, their way. Something that has been largely lost these days with the image conscious industry.

'Alright' inspires and resonates in the same way the Beatles did with 'I wanna hold your hand'. It was upbeat, fresh, new, from a new band and just good. 'Alright' is still played on the radio today and it still sounds fresh and good, which is the sure marker that establishes it as a classic from the also rans of chart music that have largely faded into obscurity.

Supergrass - 'Moving', the CD single cover

Supergrass worked as a group well, as a four piece group, their sound was big and melodic, there isn't any real formal training to be a pop musician, you learn the instrument, get inspired, hopefully write your own songs and play. You need an ear for what sounds good, you need to write songs and find an audience for them. 

Another great track that resonates with me is their song 'Moving'. I came across it on a CD single in a local second hand shop early in the 2000's after I'd moved away from the South East, where I'd lived most of my life up until then. 

Travelling back home up the motorway from the South, I remember looking out over the fields in the fading light at a string of electricity pylons going out into the distance and the song 'Moving' came into my head, yes I had moved and it was a new life and a new place.

The later Supergrass

Again, if we take a Beatles analogy, comparing 'I'm only sleeping', a later Beatles track with its minor key sound, to 'Moving' with a lovely big opening chord which sounds like a minor chord, (but is a sustained chord) and there you have the 'introspective sound', someway away from the bright youthfulness of 'Alright'. 

In the same context, (as was 'Moving' for Supergrass,) 'I'm only sleeping' shows how the Beatles before them had matured in a short time from their initial years, to the more mature sound of what would be described as their later 'introspective' work. Indeed, as their audience matured and the world around them moved on too, so did they. I love playing around with the sound of fragmented and open chords in my songwriting. 

Is there room for more music from Supergrass as a band? I think so, Gaz Coombes remains interested in writing and performing and provided there is the will and the diary co-ordination, the group could still come together to make great music.

Inevitably though people will want to hear the early material. Early as it is, it should not be written off as immature, it is anything but, it is quality because it is still played years after it was in the charts. 

Look back at chart acts of the time from the mid 90's and study the top 40's lists of the time, how many of those records on there are played on the radio today? Not as many as you might imagine.  

The internet brings us many things but it has also brought us too much choice in some respects, many bands out there might put their own songs on YouTube, but they can be lost in the sea of songs, song how to play demo's and cover versions. 

The pubs and clubs putting on live music seems to be less than before, the money for playing in one is less than it ever was, and the opportunities to do so and get a career in music are less so - sadly it seems.

Buddy Holly - Remembered 60 years on

Buddy Holly's legacy - 60 years on

Colourised picture of Buddy Holly, England 1958

February 3rd 1959, the day the music died but didn't.

The legacy of Buddy Holly's musical life remains strong and rightly so. If you dig into the past, here was a performer whose music shaped much that followed.

Buddy Holly was in the right place at the right time, in post WW2 America. America emerged from WW2 in a better position than countries in the European region devastated by 6 years of war.

Bill Haley's Comets - Hot Rods and rock n' roll - 

ingredients that lit the fuse for a generation

In the Texas state, in 50's America, Western Swing, Hillbilly mountain music and country music were ingredients waiting when Bill Hailey lit the fuse commercially in 1954 with Rock around the clock.

Buddy Holly's journey through musical styles led to country and as soon as Elvis played Lubbock, Buddy's style changed overnight. In 1955, Texas Rockabilly became an important local style of music - like jazz, it moved forward gaining and developing as new players emerged on the scene.

Being able to pick up music from Mexican radio stations had an influence on Buddy and the Crickets too, Heartbeat being just one of Buddy's songs, with the Latin beat combined with a country music double-stop intro and solo. 'Tex-Mex' they called it.

Norman Petty the genius musical producer

Whilst Buddy Holly was emerging as a songwriter and evolving his musical group into the Crickets, another catalysing force was about to enter the story. 

Norman Petty had learned about electronics during his WW2 military service and became the Texas answer to Sam Phillips who ran the legendary Sun Studios in Memphis producing Elvis, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins and countless other stars.

Like Sam Phillips and Les Paul, Norman Petty was pushing the technological and music recording boundaries. All three were using echo, microphone effects and multi tracking and producing ground-breaking sound.

Fender Sunburst Stratocaster

In 1954, Leo Fender put his legendary Fender Stratocaster guitar into production and Buddy Holly purchased one in 1956 with the help of his brother. This guitar looked futuristic then and has not dated really since, seeing off many imitators and copies.

In the studio, Buddy Holly's style and songs combined with the studio production and use of the then basic studio effects produced legendary music. The Stratocaster and his 4x10 Fender Bassman amplifier were integral to this process too.

Use of tripping echo by Petty, where Buddy's vocal line was decaying as he was starting to sing a new one sound very effective. Flipping the drums through a natural sound and echo chamber sound during the solo, was simple but effective. 

Buddy Holly used his guitar as more than just accompaniment. His guitar was used more dynamically, like a piano and right out at the forefront. 

Although Buddy did play lead runs on the guitar, various Crickets line-ups did include lead guitarists such as Sonny Curtis or Tommy Allsup for example.

Hank Marvin in 1960 - the influence extended to the glasses!

However the end result was arrived at, the legacy of this great music continues. You only have to play one of the tracks and the sound is just electric. There is something that just sets it apart from a lot of other music. It never dates.

Play along to Buddy Holly's songs and something mystical happens, you start playing things that you wouldn't normally play, phrases, notes, chord variations - it is mystical and plain spooky. It is almost like the legacy is pushing you on, evolving.

The Buddy Holly legacy even in its early days influenced guitarists who would influence others. In Britain, guitarist Hank Marvin who would find fame with the Shadows wanted a Stratocaster after seeing one on the Chirping Crickets LP cover, going on to play the first new one imported into the UK in 1959.

The Buddy Holly statue in Lubbock Texas

The Shadows (then the Drifters) backing Cliff Richard, recorded a live LP at Abbey Road studios including a Buddy Holly track the day before Buddy died. Hank Marvin developed an instrumental style of playing and covered a number of Buddy Holly tracks on his Hank plays Holly CD.

Although Buddy Holly never was able to use the tremolo arm in his playing, Hank Marvin did, incorporating it into his style, to help the guitar emulate a singing human voice.

Players including Eric Clapton, Pete Townshend, Jeff Beck, Mark Knopfler, Andy Summers and George Harrison amongst many, cited Hank Marvin as a major influence.Keith Richards was also influenced by Buddy Holly's music too, 'he had everything' Richards said on a television program about Buddy Holly. Indeed he did. 

Bobby Vee - who stepped in to play on Feb 3rd 1959

The immediate vacuum left by Buddy Holly's death was filled by artists such as Bobby Vee, who would later play with a version of the Crickets and put out some catchy hits such as 'Rubber Ball'. 

The music that followed was in retrospect syrupy and often bland, succumbing to a 'Bobby syndrome'  - a singer often named 'Bobby' whether their original name or not, usually wearing a sport jacket, driving a Ford Thunderbird and with an immaculately coiffured hair.

This fitted the direction America was going in the 1950's towards a consumer society of white picket fence, white middle class citizens living in a land of plenty and opportunity. And safe. Like something out of a 1950's soap series.

Long gone was the now out of fashion wild and leather clad style of Gene Vincent or MArlon Brando's 'Wild one'. Eddie Cochran's 'Something else' predated Punk Rock by twenty years, but was way ahead of its time. It didn't fit with the preppy and acceptable saccharine mush of the new decade of the 1960s.

Buddy Holly was in his last months refining his songwriting style and moving and developing his career into something bigger. His move to Manhattan in New York, a cosmopolitan 24-hour town, away from the staid and conservative Lubbock, was opening up new possibilities for him including acting. 

Interestingly, John Lennon, another performer greatly influenced by Buddy Holly also lived in New York in his final months. If you compare one of Lennon's last tracks 'Nobody told me,' you can hear a 'Holly-esque' echo laden sound, it is almost like the whole thing came full circle.

The simple memorial stone to Buddy Holly at Lubbock

With Buddy Holly's death, we are fortunate that Maria Elena Holly and Buddy's family have allowed the legacy of work and his life to be accessible.

With a Buddy Holly Centre and a museum devoted to artefacts Buddy owned in his life, we are thankfully able to see the legacy large as life and not hidden away for the privileged few or family to see.

Rave On - a great compilation album

In 1983 I bought a double cassette tape that was called 'Then came rock n' roll.' I still have it, on that was 'That'll be the day' by Buddy Holly and it was just such a great sound. 

Around that time I was in a band with some friends I had been at school with and I was in a second hand shop that also sold guitars and I found 'Rave on' a compilation of Buddy Holly's songs. It opened with 'Rave on'.

When I heard that song I was blown away, I played it again to appreciate the sound and what was going on. It sounded immense. Having tracked down many of Buddy's songs over the years, what is apparent is there was so much potential in that music, intensely written and recorded. Who knows where it would have gone onto?

In 1992 I saw the Buddy Holly stage show in London and bought the cassette tape, on that was a track I hadn't heard called  'Its so easy' and what a great track that is. In the round, there are just so many great tracks to choose from them in this legacy that is Buddy Holly. 

Can you choose a definitive Buddy Holly track? Difficult. There are so many. Everyone has a favourite. That's the great thing, the songs sound fresh as though they were recorded yesterday and people still love them.

Is the British High Street finished as a buisness model?

Going, going gone... 

High Street shops are going, is the end of bricks and mortar retail?

We have recently seen BHS, House of Fraser and Toys R Us essentially go bust, Debenhams limps on ( I predicted it would be affected some time ago), the question is, is there any future in High Street retail outlets other than existing in the form of Coffee shops and Charity shops?

20 years ago I worked for a small but highly important supplier of food products to the major suppliers like Heinz and the leading supermarkets such as Marks and Spencer. This supplier had been bought and amalgamated with another supplier by an investment group to sell on.

A major manufacturing company bought the supplier I worked for and my thoughts were it was going to asset strip it for the brand labels and substitute the products with lower quality ones. I was proven right. Some key staff were retained due to their business relationships with the customer base, but the majority of staff were disposed of through redundancy due to duplication.

That was when the internet in the UK was in its early years.

20 years later and the on-line market place is where it is largely at. A supplier my present company deals with told me that 95% of their commerce traffic is now done on-line without any human intervention. This supplier has recently built a massive warehouse in Holland where no human staff are employed. Automation and robotics is the new now.

This is the new business model. 

When Toys R Us went bust a while back, I was shocked. This should have been a retail chain that should have survived, but it failed, as a casualty of super sites, like Ebay and Amazon - effectively the planet's middlemen.

Ebay and Amazon allow listing of items on their site, the same items often, the buyer makes a choice built on sales performance but mostly on price, the cheapest wins the deal. When an Amazon seller sells as a 3rd party supplier without the goods being in an Amazon warehouse, Amazon has a double win. It achieves a sale and revenue without the hassle and cost of storing, picking and transportation issues and takes a bit of revenue.

Plus it also helps if your company is based in a location with favourable tax levels and laws which the High Street mostly does not.

The on-line boom is good for some companies, but the convenience of on-line retail has taken its toll of the bricks and mortar brands, such as House of Fraser etc. 

The on-liners can operate cheaper, they don't have to have numerous shop floor staff on hand even when customer foot fall is slack, they don't have the multiple stores' business rates, running costs, staff costs, they can buy in cheap and sell quickly on, they don't have big rents or big leases to pay for.

This is why a House of Fraser type of takeover was a good deal, a lot of Bricks and Mortar that can be sold off, brands that can be cherry picked by a buyer and then sold on, the liabilities and overheads can be sold or disposed of largely quite easily and quickly and the future direction decided on whatever the buyer's plan is.

If you run a chain of stores for example with dated looking products, relying on peak time footfall, you are going to be hit hard. And that's why Debenhams is a walking Dinosaur.

People are 'time poor' these days and why waste hours going to a town to shop and try and find a parking space at probably some high price, when you can order on-line and return the item if you don't like it? Without leaving your house.....

That's why the High Street is sinking, those with the disposable income (pensioners mainly) are shrinking as a population - the pre WW2 generation had maybe 2-5 plus children in a couple 'generation', in WW2 it was about 2 per couple 'generation' and in the 60's on, the ability to choose a family or not has altered the demographic downwards with many couples choosing no family as an option.

Shrinking the 'generational population' has potentially shrunk demand consumption of goods for those original to the UK, but is buoyed by those who have come to live in the UK.

As we have seen even the mighty FW Woolworths could not survive the onslaught of the web. It wasn't 'Amazon big enough' to offer what people wanted or might want, it didn't have the floorspace or the warehouse space to be an Amazon.

Where can the High Street survive? Well, in my view, only niche shops offering specialised or unique products (where there is a market to service supporting it) could survive. If you offer a service that other on-liners don't, clearly this is an advantage.

The bottom line is customer footfall - the punter coming into your shop and buying a product. We probably buy on-line from places we have never visited, never will and develop trading relationships with people we are likely ever to meet over the years. 

Another key factor is how you deal with customer returns and warranty issues, the High Street business is good at that, they have the face to face contact to do so, but the faceless on-line retailer has to also do that too.

The High Street can't always better on-line price, it suffers from the overheads of staff, premises etc. On-line retailing cuts out human intervention to such a degree it more than pays for itself. If any humans work there, they are either packing the order or just booking the courier collection more than they may select the goods, depending on the set up.

Automation and robotics is taking over, algorythmical seeding is transforming marketing massively, sending the results to the iPhone or tablet, human intervention is shrinking.

When proxy living and big data get a hold and we subsume our 'daily dross' to computers to deal with, that will be a game-changer. The on-line situation will literally expand explosively.

Unless your High Street shop can offer something unique and or cheaper, pull the shutters down and sell up.