It was perhaps inevitable that Caine would show up in Mike Myers’ 60s-spy spoof: he plays Nigel, Austin and Evil’s dad, who is still the bum-pinching dinosaur of yore. Broad comedy mugging isn’t really Caine’s strength, but he gets through it fine. 44. King of Thieves (2018) On the stairs...he tried to remember what that question of hers had been which he had never answered. It could not have been very important. The only questions of importance were those which a man asked himself.” The only ones who do care about Charlie are his wife and his doctor - two by-standers. Except of course, that this is Greene-land where soon enough things turn out different from what they appear. Magnifico, grandioso, rimpianto, indimenticabile Bob Hoskins. Qui è il capo della polizia argentina, colui che informa Parr/Gere che fa male a sperare nella liberazione di suo padre, che è morto ormai da tempo. One could believe this humorous novel, but in fact, not really. In a country in revolution, Doctor Plarr lives a small dead town, looks after its patients all day long and converses in the evening with his only English relations Doctor Humphries and the honorary consul Charley Fortnum. Charley Fortnum is a grotesque and alcoholic character who is useless for his country and makes a living from what the English state gives him. One fine day, he was accidentally kidnapped instead of the ambassador. But who would want to release prisoners of war in exchange for the release of this unknown and useless little honorary consul?

Catholic guilt is one of the central themes of the novel. The head of the revolutionary kidnappers is an ex-priest and he becomes conflicted at the prospect of having to murder Fortnum when he realizes that British and Argentinian authorities have no interest in negotiating the release of a honorary consul. The latter half of the novel is filled with long discussions between the kidnappers, Fortnum and Plarr about Christinaity, sin and forgiveness. It does get a bit long-winded and funny after a while. Director of Research Development and Innovation, University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust Another leftfield choice that showed Caine wasn’t afraid to take a chance: big stars didn’t do movies with puppets. This could easily have been a disaster, but Caine absolutely nails it as Scrooge; his customary total commitment to a role undeterred by the presence of Kermit, Miss Piggy and the rest. It’s the seriousness with which he takes it that’s the key: Caine said he would play it like Shakespeare, and he did. 9. The Italian Job (1969) Due anni dopo il console onorario chiama a casa sua Eduardo Parr, che non dimentichiamoci è medico: si tratta di visitare la sua giovane moglie.Starring: Michael Caine, Richard Gere, Bob Hoskins, Elpidia Carrillo, Joaquim de Almeida, A Martinez, Stephanie Cotsirilos, Domingo Ambriz, Geoffrey Palmer, Jorge Russek, Erika Carlsson, George Belanger. Greene’s central character was one Eduardo Plarr, a half-Paraguayan, half-British doctor in provincial Argentina who quietly assists some revolutionaries in their attempt to kidnap the American ambassador and equally casually impregnates the very young native wife of the besotted honorary consul from Britain, Charley Fortnum. The rebels blunderingly capture Fortnum instead of the intended Yank, but detain and threaten to execute him anyway unless some of their comrades are released from prison. There is a kind of nobility in the way he accepts his fate, after the terrorists kidnap him and nobody, frankly, cares enough to ransom him. There is also a real person here, in a performance that suggests Fortnum's life up until this point, his history of failure, his essential good nature.

The story is set in Corrientes, a small town in north east Argentina. Eduardo Plarr is a doctor of Paraguayan and British parentage. As a boy, he was forced to flee his native Paraguay after the arrest and subsequent disappearance of his father, a dissident. Plarr makes the acquaintance of the dissolute and heavy-drinking Charley Fortnum, the honorary British consul. He also meets Colonel Perez, the local police chief. In a conversation with Nicholas Shakespeare, Graham Greene once named 'The Honorary Consul' as his favourite among all his novels, "..because the characters change and that is very difficult to do." There is a lot here about fathers of all types – both familial and religious and the long shadows that they can cast. There is also much here concerning political causes in the wider sense, in relation to the resultant moral and religious dilemmas at a personal level. Macro idealism vs reality at the Micro level. With Sean Connery in The Man Who Would Be King. Photograph: Allstar/Columbia/Sportsphoto Ltd 1. The Man Who Would Be King (1975)I was kidding myself. My workplace attitude had turned me into my own dreaded Other. So it was no longer the merely Same, as Levinas says. My own bipolar self gelled. Alla fine Plarr e Fortnum scoprono di volersi bene, nonostante il ferale tradimento scoperto all'ultimo momento e Plarr scopre di essere in fondo assai più simile al padre di quanto avesse mai creduto. Un'altra cosa si scopre alla fine, oltre al fatto che il vecchio console ubriacone è la figura umanamente migliore del libro: che l'amore è assai più forte e persistente dell'indifferenza, nonostante tutto. Rivas and Aquino take Plarr to a squalid hut in a shanty town while bargaining with the authorities. Plarr has been taken to the hut to treat Fortnum, who has been shot in the leg while attempting to escape, lies drinking whisky. Fortnum spends much of his time, as he faces up to his impending death, sentimentalizing about Clara and remembering the fearsome figure of his father. He overhears Plarr confessing his adultery with Clara and that the child is Plarr's. Army paratroopers surround the hut while the failed priest, Rivas, conducts a makeshift mass inside with the rain coming down. When the police deadline is about to expire, Plarr goes out to talk with them, with Leon shooting him in his leg. The paratroopers shoot Plarr, Leon and Aquino dead, with Plarr's death blamed on the kidnappers. The surviving kidnappers and Rivas's wife are captured, and Fortnum restored to Clara. The intellectual conversations at Clara’s (former) brothel between Plarr and local writer Doctor Saavedra are amusing - and Saavedra comes off as a joke, a man obsessed with machismo - until we see that he lives in poverty and Plarr gives him grudging respect for devoting his life to literature. Greene’s idea of Argentine machismo is accurate in its knife fights but also seems mixed up with the Mexican version which is more pervasive than the Argentine one. I thought I was being a Christian by being positive, and that was wrong. You become a Christian - like a straight William Burroughs - by seeing EXACTLY what's on your plate. Then you wake up.