Lewis Gilbert (1966)

Halfway through Alfie there’s a pub brawl, clumsily staged and irrelevant to what’s gone before (or what’s to come).   It seems an anxious attempt to inject cinematic ‘action’ into the proceedings – this kind of anxiety isn’t unusual on the part of film-makers working with material written for the theatre.  But, for most of the movie, Lewis Gilbert and Bill Naughton are not only comfortable with the stage origins[1] of the piece; they make a virtue of it.  Michael Caine’s Alfie Elkins speaks direct to camera throughout and being buttonholed like this sharpens your awareness of how you feel about this seemingly heartless, working-class London Lothario.  Alfie is still perhaps Michael Caine’s most famous role and it’s by miles the best performance I’ve seen from him.  He handles the technical transitions – interrupting a scene he’s playing with another actor to address the audience then returning to the scene – with ease and wit.  A fine example is the sequence in which Alfie is being examined by a doctor (Eleanor Bron – a bit too self-aware, as usual).  Caine strikes a penetrating balance between charming and shocking the audience:  the speaking-to-camera device and his playing make us complicit with Alfie; that complicity makes us all the more appalled by his big-headed, thick-skinned self-justification.   (He’s sometimes like a prototype for the Harry Enfield-Paul Whitehouse Self-Righteous Brothers.)

It’s hard to be sure at this distance in time, though, whether audiences in the mid-1960s felt quite the same way.  A problem with the material in 2011 (I’ve not seen the 2004 remake with Jude Law in the role) is that while Alfie’s chauvinism is meant to be outrageous the film suggests that it’s only his promiscuity that’s reprehensible.  The message seems to be that Alfie just needs to settle down and get married, as if that would guarantee monogamy and transform his attitude towards women.  It’s hard to accept that when what sticks in your mind (and throat) is Alfie repeatedly referring to a girlfriend as ‘it’ – in a lengthy explanation of how his latest conquest (Jane Asher) is getting on his nerves.  And Alfie is a real man.  Judging from the characterisation of the other males in the story, Lewis Gilbert and Bill Naughton appear to share the protagonist’s affable contempt for nice guys:  the husband whose unsuspecting boringness is the reason his wife (Millicent Martin) wants an extra-marital fling; the bus conductor (Graham Stark) who marries Gilda (Julia Foster), a girl whom Alfie gets pregnant; Harry (Alfie Bass), a fellow patient in the TB clinic where Alfie is convalescing and whose wife Lily (Vivien Merchant) ends up having a humiliating abortion, also thanks to Alfie; Alfie’s neutered pal Nat (Murray Melvin).  Needless to say, this impression is reinforced by the personalities of the actors in these roles – but why cast them unless this is the impression you want to create?

The story and character of Alfie would be unpalatably bitter, of course, and the commercial prospects of the piece shattered, if he were a heartless bastard deep down.  So it hurts him when Gilda marries the bus conductor and it hurts him more when he (improbably) stumbles across a church where their own baby is being christened and Alfie’s now infant son is running around.  Alfie weeps in horror when he sees the aborted foetus that he fathered.  The film begins and ends with the appearance of an appealing mongrel dog:  at the start it’s having it off with another dog; at the end, when Alfie tells us he doesn’t ‘have peace of mind’ and asks ‘What’s it all about?’, the dog trots up to Alfie and the two kindred spirits look each other in the eye.  These moments seem meant to show that Alfie has feelings but you’re not convinced those feelings extend beyond self-pity or that Lewis Gilbert’s attitude towards Alfie is much more than shrewd sentimentality.  On the rare occasions when Alfie shows this different side, Bill Naughton’s writing of the character is much less secure – as when Alfie describes the foetus as ‘a perfectly formed being’.

Because its dynamic is so different the affair between Alfie and a middle-aged and affluent American woman called Ruby is almost refreshing:  it’s clear from the start of this liaison that Alfie’s the one being used.   Shelley Winters’ portrait of Ruby is precisely vivid and enjoyable; in fact all Alfie’s lovers are well played – the roles may be conceived as types but Bill Naughton has a good ear for dialogue and the actresses (who also include Shirley Anne Field as a nurse at the TB clinic) are good enough to individualise the characters.  Vivien Merchant as Lily is outstanding.  From her first scene it’s as if she’s waiting to be hurt (although this effect is produced very subtly) and her cry of pain after the abortion is piercing.   The cast also includes Denholm Elliott as the abortionist, Sydney Tafler as a jilted long-distance lorry driver, Queenie Watts (singing in the pub where the fight breaks out), Bryan Marshall and Tony Selby.   I never realised before now that it was Cher who sang the Burt Bacharach-Hal David theme song over the closing credits.

29 December 2011

[1]  Strictly speaking, ‘origins’ isn’t the right word.  According to Pauline Kael, Bill Naughton’s Alfie began life as a radio play.  It then became a stage play and a novel before it was adapted for the cinema.