Affectionate tribute to two great actors a gentle and dignified finale

3 stars

This affectionate tribute to two great names of the screen is a gentle and dignified finale that will leave few who have followed their long careers dry-eyed. The film's gentle tone, peppered with moments when we assume the veteran actors are being true to themselves, suits them both really well.

Both Michael Caine and the late Glenda Jackson were proud working-class actors who did not find the need to transform themselves and their accents to escalate their careers. They did it by being their earthy, down-to-earth selves. Jackson died last year, after a brief illness. Caine, at 90, worries he may not make it to lunch.

A cut-glass enunciated disguise in performance was an irrelevance. Caine, who always looks like he is up for mischief, kept his Cockney accent where possible, believing that he would be a good role model for young aspiring actors who weren't born into privilege. No doubt he was.

Jackson was a brilliant, fearless actor who played kings and queens from Lear to Elizabeth before she quit stage and screen to enter the British Parliament as an Labour MP. The politics of both actors took sharply different directions, but they seem to have stayed true to their working-class roots.

In another sense entirely, The Great Escaper, directed by Oliver Parker from a screenplay by William Ivory, is a tribute to the brave Allied veterans who in World War II fought to reclaim continental Europe from Nazism. It is loosely based on the true story of an 89-year-old Royal Navy veteran, Bernard Jordan, who had inadvertently missed his chance of joining in the 70^th anniversary D-Day celebrations in 2014. But the self-described "coffin-dodger" got himself there anyway. At least Bernie wasn't so very far away, just across the Channel.

In the film, Bernie (Caine) and his wife Irene, or Rene (Jackson), live in an old folks home near the sea, where they can enjoy a spin along the promenade on the seafront as he pushes her along in her wheelchair. In another scene, Caine uses a walker. It was brave of them both to take part in this, where every frailty is writ large on the big screen. The Great Escaper is also a prompt to us to have another look at the films they are famous for.

One day Bernie kisses his wife goodbye before slipping out to catch the bus to Portsmouth and board a ferry for the French coast. This is of course Bernie's story, following him to France where he teams up with a former RAF pilot who also has his demons to allay.

Caine and Jackson were last seen together in the mid-1970s, as an ill-matched couple in The Romantic Englishwoman. It's a contrast to them here as an elderly married couple who fell in love during wartime and, still in love, have stayed the course. There are flashbacks the film didn't really need, to the pair as a young couple, played by Laura Marcus and Will Fletcher, who are bathed in a honeyed, romantic glow.

If the kindly concern of the nursing home staff is a bit patronising from time to time, the moment Caine and Jackson appear, all that is sent packing. The film could so easily have slipped into a British telly drama at any point, despite a sweet performance from Danielle Vitalis as the young nurse Adele who befriends Rene, and this is its weakness.

Caine and Jackson won't allow that to happen, and they are lovely together. Shuffling around, looking out for each other, being kind and loving in their salty, no-nonsense ways.