Alfie (1966)

Alfie is a British romantic film drama first released in 1966, directed by Lewis Gilbert.  The film stars Michael Caine, Shelley Winters, Millicent Martin, Julia Foster and Jane Asher.  Our overall rating for this film is: excellent.


Alfie likes women, he likes them a lot.  In fact, you could say that women are his main interest in life, his raison d’être so to speak.  However, he’d rather leap stark naked into a bubbling volcano than get himself shackled to the same woman for the rest of his life.  To him, a woman is like a hire car.  You ride about in it for a week or two, see how much the engine will take and try not to scratch the paintwork.  When it begins to get too cosy, too familiar, you trade it in for another model, one with a bit more zip if you are lucky.  Occasionally, accidents will happen.  Look at poor Gilda, ending up in the family way.  Still, it was her fault, she could have given the kid up for adoption and all would be as right as rain.  The odd thing was that Alfie became kind of attached to the kid once it was born.  It brought a new purpose into his life - or it did until Gilda got herself hitched to another bloke and poor Alfie was marched towards the door marked Exit.  Still, plenty more fish.  Take this bird at the motorway service station, Annie.  That’s what Alfie did – took her back to his place in London and made her a willing slave.  She’d do anything for him - scrub his floors, cook his meals, even wash his shirts whether they needed it or not.  Of course, in the end it all got too much.  There’s only so much suet and custard a man can digest.  So it was soon goodbye Annie.  Then came the day of reckoning, Alfie’s second brush with fatherhood.  Only this time it’s his friend’s wife who is heading for the maternity suite.  Alfie doesn’t want another sprog, neither does its mother.  Only one solution, but it doesn’t come cheap.  In fact, this little incident will cost Alfie far more than he knows...

Coming in the wake of Zulu and The Ipcress File, Alfie was the film that confirmed Michael Caine’s status as a major star of British cinema, rivalled in box office appeal only by Sean Connery, who was still riding high on the success of the James Bond films.  In a career-defining role, Caine achieves the impossible – making the most egregiously egoistical misogynist that he portrays (with such authenticity that you’d swear he had been custom-built for the role) into a sympathetic and believable character.  Any other actor playing the part would most probably have been crucified and ritually disembowelled by Women’s Lib adherents within hours of the film hitting the big screen.  Michael Caine’s charm allows him to get away with murder – and worse – in this cult masterpiece.

Of course, no offence is intended.  The film is meant to be tongue-in-cheek, a wry look at the permissive society and its unintended consequences.  What at first appears to be a ribald sex comedy that glorifies wanton promiscuity is in fact a cautionary tale, a bleak existential drama in which a lecherous Cockney Jack the Lad gradually wakes up to the fact that his hedonistic, über-cynical life is totally without meaning.  Who was it that said life without pain was not a life worth having?

Alfie deserves its reputation as one of the true classics of British cinema.  Bill Naughton’s script (which he adapted from his novel and stage play) is relentlessly funny from the first line, but with a dark underbelly that leaves us in no doubt that the central protagonist is a desperately tragic character who is heading for a very rude awakening.  Lewis Gilbert’s direction is unfussy, yet stylish and effective, deriving the maximum impact from Caine’s tour de force performance.  It’s little wonder the film was a critical and commercial success.  The film won the Jury Special Prize at Cannes in 1967 and was nominated for five Oscars, including nominations in the Best Picture and Best Leading Actor categories.

Lewis Gilbert was initially uncertain whether Michael Caine was the right man for the job, but he could hardly have chosen better.  Who else could play an arrogant self-absorbed woman-abusing fiend so realistically and yet be so irresistibly likeable?  No one.  Alfie’s frequent asides, where Caine turns to face the camera so that he can offload another torrent of industrial strength chauvinism, are a brilliant device that allows us to see into his soul, and give us a guilty laugh as the same time.  

In his subsequent, highly productive career, Michael Caine would rarely give a performance as compelling and entertaining as the one he gives here, although he gave comparable  value in his next film for Lewis Gilbert, Educating Rita (1983), another classic that vividly evokes the time in which it was made.  Whilst Alfie’s 2004 remake with Jude Law, is watchable, it isn’t a patch on the original – but how could it be?

© filmsdefrance.com 2009

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