The Last Valley. 1971. UK/USA. Written and directed by James Clavell. With Michael Caine, Omar Sharif, Florina Bolkan. 35mm. 128 min.
One of the surprising discoveries of Michael Caine’s career is James Clavell’s thoughtfully researched The Last Valley, which uses the Thirty Years War, a wave of religious and political bloodbaths that spread across plague-afflicted Europe from 1916 through 1648, as the backdrop for a philosophical drama in which a battle-scarred German mercenary (Michael Caine) uses a fugitive schoolteacher (Omar Sharif) to wage a fragile peace with the peasants of a secluded, paradisical valley. A commercial and critical disaster, The Last Valley forced Clavell back to the solitary life of a novelist, the happy outcome of which would be Shōgun a few years later. Caine, meanwhile, took the role because “ever since Alfie I had been identified with his character as a bird-pulling Cockney bloke and I was determined to try to change that view…. [The mercenary captain] was apparently a man of great brutality. I wanted to get behind that to show [that] he was a man who had come to understand the futility of war. It was an understated performance—like most of my work—but it’s one of the ones I’m most proud of.”