Alfie (1966)

Official trailer

Talking to You

Alfie Elkins is a chauffeur in London, and he spends the whole film talking to you. He turns to the camera in the middle of a seduction, a quarrel or a pub crawl and explains what’s going on, what he thinks of women, who he fancies this week and why none of them will ever tie him down. He’s cheerful, cocky and completely sure of himself.

Michael Caine plays him. The role made him an international star. He’s charming, funny and so relaxed on camera that you forget he’s talking to you. You like him, even as he’s saying appalling things, because he’s so frank about being a rotter.

Lewis Gilbert directed it, from Bill Naughton’s stage play, and people usually call it a swinging sixties comedy. That undersells it badly. It’s a film about a man slowly realizing he’s wasted his life.

Caine is the reason I’d sit through it again.

I spent the first hour enjoying his company more than I wanted to, and then the film made me pay for enjoying it. That’s a nasty trick and I love it. The episodic middle drags for me, and the ending hurts in a way the swinging-sixties label never prepares you for.

The Women

Alfie goes through women like cigarettes. There’s Siddie, a married woman he sees on the side. There’s Gilda, a sweet, devoted girl who has his baby and whom he won’t marry. There’s Annie, a young hitchhiker he takes in and treats like a housemaid, and Lily, the wife of a friend he meets in a sanatorium. And there’s Ruby, a rich, brassy older American played by Shelley Winters, who gives him as good as he gives her.

Each of them sees something in him, and each of them gets hurt, some a little, one terribly. Gilbert doesn’t hide any of it. Alfie tells you it’s all harmless fun, and the camera shows you it isn’t.

The women are the conscience of the film, and several of them are wonderfully played. Vivien Merchant’s Lily, in a handful of scenes, earned an Oscar nomination. Julia Foster wrecks me as Gilda. She’s so decent and so patient with him, and I wanted to shake Alfie for how casually he takes her for granted. Shelley Winters is the opposite pleasure, the one woman who gives him as good as she gets, and I enjoyed every minute she had the upper hand.

Malcolm

The one relationship that gets to Alfie is with his son, Malcolm, Gilda’s baby. Alfie didn’t want him, but he finds himself taking the boy to the park, buying him toys and loving him. Then Gilda marries a decent, dull bus conductor who’ll take care of them both, and Alfie is pushed out.

There’s a scene where he watches his son through the railings of a church, as the boy goes off with his new family, and Caine’s face tells you everything. It’s the first time you see Alfie realize that his freedom has cost him something he can’t get back.

That shot through the railings is where the film stopped being a lark for me. Caine does it all with his face, and it’s the moment I stopped laughing along with him.

Lily

The darkest part of the film involves Lily, who becomes pregnant by Alfie and arranges an illegal abortion in his flat. Abortion was still a crime in Britain at the time. Denholm Elliott plays the abortionist, a cold, seedy, matter-of-fact man, and the scene is quiet and chilling.

Afterwards, Alfie sees what’s happened, and he breaks down for the first time.

He goes to talk to a friend and cries, and when he turns back to the camera, he’s not joking any more. I can’t think of a more powerful moment in sixties British cinema. It turns a comedy into a tragedy in one scene and wins the film its 8.

The film was made just before Britain legalized abortion in 1967, and it’s often credited with helping to shift public opinion. It handles the subject with seriousness and compassion, and it doesn’t let Alfie off the hook.

What’s It All About?

By the end, Ruby has dumped Alfie for a younger man, and Alfie has lost his son, hurt nearly everybody who cared about him and ended up alone on a London bridge at night. He turns to the camera one last time and asks what it’s all about. He doesn’t know. He’s still a little cocky, still trying to be cheerful. But he’s lonely, and he knows it now.

That’s a brave, bleak ending for a film that started out as a lark. There’s no punishment, no redemption and no lesson spelled out. Just a man who’s finally started to see himself, too late to fix much of it.

Swinging London

Gilbert captures London in the mid-sixties beautifully, from the smoky pubs and cramped bedsits to the parks, sanatoriums and grand hotels. It’s more working-class than the glossy swinging-London films of the time, and it feels real. Sonny Rollins wrote and played the jazz score, loose, sexy and melancholy.

Rollins’s score is my favorite thing about the film after Caine. It sounds like two in the morning in a bar where nobody is going home happy, and it tells you how this story ends long before Alfie figures it out. Burt Bacharach and Hal David wrote the famous song Alfie for the film. Cilla Black sang it in Britain, and Cher recorded a version for the American release. It was nominated for an Oscar and became a standard, sung by just about everybody since.

How It’s Aged

Some of Alfie’s attitudes are grim to sit through today, and some viewers find the first half too pleased with its charming cad. The film’s middle is episodic, and a few of the women get little more than a scene. Still, the film knows exactly what Alfie is, and it makes him pay for it. It’s funny, cruel and truthful in a way sixties films rarely were, and Caine is marvelous. Skip the 2004 Jude Law remake. It misses everything that matters.

Craft Note

What It’s All About

Yes. It’s an 8: a cheeky, funny and sad film about a London charmer who doesn’t realize what he’s losing until it’s gone, with Michael Caine at his most magnetic. It’s much darker and better than its reputation as a swinging-sixties romp. The railings scene and the breakdown after Lily are why I rate it this high. The saggy, episodic middle and a few women who barely get a scene are why it doesn’t go higher.

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