Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie's plot.

"You know what I mean?"

Marginally employed bloke-about-town Alfie Elkins (Michael Caine) seems to end nearly every sentence with those five words. The most interesting gimmick in Lewis Gilbert's 1965 film Alfie is the frequency with which the main character breaks the fourth wall (or the cinematic equivalent) and directly addresses the audience. Sure, this has been a convention in plays for centuries. And Alfie was, after all, a play by Bill Naughton before it was a film. But it's still slightly surprising when the lead in a movie breaks from the on-screen reality of the film to speak to you, while the action goes on all around him. In his addresses to the audience, Alfie is vastly more honest than in his everyday interactions with the film's characters.

The major result of this device is that the audience is able to muster sympathy for Alfie, a character who, under normal circumstances, we would be inclined to dislike. But even more importantly, Alfie's conversations with us, invite us to feel *empathy* with the character. When Alfie uses the phrase "You know what I mean" not just as a verbal tick but because he honestly believes that the people he's talking to *do* know what he means. His conversations with the audience have a tone of familiarity that encourages the audience to look for truth in what Alfie's saying and to look for commonalities in your own life. Sure, Alfie seems to be saying, I'm not a great guy, but I'm not the Devil either. And, basically, we've all been there. The engaged viewer becomes an accomplice in Alfie's misogyny and party to whatever highs and lows the character goes through.

The direct address portions of the film are pretty much the only reason why Alfie remains fresh today. Well, that and the performances, most particularly by the star of Jaws: The Revenge and Blame It On Rio, a certain Mr. Caine.

To say that Alfie has a plot would probably be generous. More than anything, it has a lead character and a setting and the film basically steps back and lets that character navigate through the universe of the film. In Swingin' London of the 1960s, Alfie is a sometime chauffeur, sometime photographer, full-time lady's man. His specialty is married women, because married women don't expect as much as single girls do. Alfie calls women "birds," which may have been common at the time, but he also calls them "it," which probably wasn't so common. He likes women to cook for him, wash for him, have sex with him, and not bother him too much with their problems. "My understanding of women only goes as far as the pleasure," he admits, "When it comes to the pain, I'm like every other bloke… I don't want to know." But that, and his credo of never getting involved, has done fine by Alfie. He has a long string of "birds" who he can go to for a quick shag and then there's also Gilda (Julia Foster), who Alfie says is a little dumb, but she's still the girl he goes home to most evenings. But when Gilda gets pregnant, things get a little more complicated for Alfie. And at a certain point things start skipping around in time, as Alfie develops a little here, regresses a little there. He has flings with sad mother-of-three Lily (Vivien Merchant) and with Ruby (Shelley Winters), an American divorcee who may be the distaff version of Alfie. Lots of birds, lots of snogging, not much plot. But mostly we're just supposed to be repulsed and seduced by Alfie.

Alfie *is* the movie, pretty much. He's not an omniscient narrator and we're seeing the story as he lives it, but his is still a world where Alfie is in the foreground and everybody else seems to be in the background going on with their less interesting lives. It's in the light that Caine's performance (the best of his long and much lauded career) is especially remarkable. The film is mostly speeches and the speeches are all given by Alfie. And because Lewis Gilbert and Bill Naughton have done virtually nothing to expand the scope of the play, most of Caine's scenes are done in single shots, with very theatrical, centered frames. What that mostly means is that Caine's performance is laid bare. There are no tricks here, just an actor and the camera. The Goddard line which I may have mentioned previously (it's a favorite of mine) is that in cinema every cut (or edit) is a lie. It allows for performances manufactured from hundreds of takes, angles, and reactions. But with Alfie, Lewis Gilbert eschews the shot-reverse shot language that makes up so many similarly talky films (we see one person talking, then cut to somebody else's reaction, then back to the person talking... it allows us to identify with both characters in a conversation). Gilbert doesn't care if we identify with the women in Alfie's life. He wants our reactions to Alfie to unadulterated by divergent loyalties. If you're gonna hate Alfie, you're gonna do it on Alfie's terms. The camera doesn't flinch regardless of how he chooses to degrade women. You have to choose to either laugh, adore, or detest this character and Caine is a gifted enough actor that he's capable of making you bounce from emotion to emotion. Spitting out long lines of dialogue with his thick Cockney accent, Caine is in total control, a master manipulator who seems more interesting in getting the audience's understanding than in getting the love of any of the women. The women are easy. He can charm them without effort. But Alfie seems to understand that the audience is going to be a tough nut to crack and that, perhaps, there may even be "birds" listening to him. He never acknowledges that possibility, but Alfie's a sharp guy and he probably knows.

Though the women are largely disposable characters, the actresses occupying the roles are surprisingly good. Merchant was nominated for an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her fine work as Lily, whose husband has been in a sanitorium for over a year, leaving her with three kids, but without much love. Julia Foster and Jane Asher are effective mostly in their passivity. Both women think they can change Alfie, but are too weak to really try, so they end up desperately hoping he'll change himself. In one scene, Julia Foster's Gilda gets to stare into the camera in resignation. She doesn't talk to the viewer, but for a brief second we make eye contact. And Shelley Winters gives a loud, lively performance as the rich and slightly-older Ruby. There's still something kinda yucky to me about Shelley Winters in a part that flaunts her "sex appeal," but I guess that's part of the point here. Maybe you or I wouldn't call Shelley Winters a "little lust box," but Alfie sure does.

Among the male supporting cast, only Denholm Elliott as a chilling abortionist makes an impression, but he's so great in his single scene that you end up wondering what terrible stories his character could tell and how interested you'd be in a movie following him for a couple days.

People lump Alfie in among other classic "Swinging London" films directed by folks like John Schlesinger (Billy Liar,Darling, and later, the great Midnight Cowboy), Antonioni (Blowup) and Richard Lester (the Philadelphia-raised director of the early Beatles films and The Knack… and how to get it). The major difference I can see is that Schlesinger, Lester, and Antonioni were master directors and saw themselves at the forefront of an art movement which would allow them to make cinema as alive as the culture that spawned it. Lewis Gilbert, on the other hand, as a workman director who went from a bunch of B pictures before Alfie to direct three James Bond films (Moonraker, The Spy Who Loved Me, and You Only Live Twice, if you're scoring at home). And while Alfie may have been set in the mid-1960s and it may have reflected the moral climate of the time, it's stylistically stagnant. Symptomatic of the film's dullness is the fact that Sonny Rollins's fine, but predictably bland, score totally precludes any kind of rock and roll influence in the picture. It's like the British Invasion headed to America and left behind the London of Alfie, totally devoid of rock. It's a sad and colorless place and the ennui isn't entirely removed by the film's closing musical number [predictably called] "Alfie," written by Burt Bacharach and sung by Cher.

Gilbert shoots Alfie like a play and so everything feels canned. He handles the tone shifts very well, to be fair. Alfie is funny, but it gets darker and darker as the film goes along. The turning point in tone is a hilarious bar brawl, like something out of a parody of a Hollywood western. The slapstick mayhem has little connection to anything else in the film, but it works, providing a last burst of humor before Alfie moves into more disturbing territory.

**Spoiler -- I'm going to discuss the ending of the film in semi-broad terms. I'm not going to go into extensive details, but I am going to go into some, so skip ahead if you don't want to know the final act of the movie **

I guess I'm a little bothered by where the film ends up on the political spectrum. I can't help but read the final thirty minutes of the movie as a conservative reaction not just to Alfie's life, which is clearly flawed, but to any and all liberal progress of the period. The fact that an aborted fetus serves as Alfie's major catalyst towards personal change is telling. Earlier in the film, Alfie made it clear to one of his girlfriends that she has the right to do whatever she chose with her life and that he shouldn't stand in her way. But after one mistress has an abortion in his kitchen, Alfie says that he felt like a murderer. I guess I'm wondering, then, if the ideology of the film ends up being that all of the choices offered by the Counterculture were actually detrimental to society and that being liberated is, in the language of the film, merely code for being opposed to marriage, children, and traditional virtues. In its conclusion, Alfie finds himself yearning for old fashioned relationships, religion, and stability, suggesting that those are the ideals, rather than his previous ways. Since I don't suspect that those were the only two options open to people in the period, I wonder why the film chooses to load the deck making Alfie's choice a black and white one between sin and virtue as if there are clearly delineated limits. Alfie, and his swinging existence, seems to have no place in the civilized society that the film seems to be searching for. In this light, I find myself wishing for the difficult choices in a swinging film like Richard Lester's Petulia (actually set in San Francisco), in which the distinctions between mainstream and counter-culture seem much more conflicted. With Alfie we know the main character is on a path to ruin and we can only wait for him to discover it.

***Discussion over***

Bill Naughton's adaptation of Alfie leaves many fun scenes before things start getting problematic. And I enjoy any movie that makes good use of London settings, as this film does. But finally, Alfie is all about Michael Caine's performance. I find it interesting to look at Caine's work a couple years back in the fine flick Little Voice. That film suggests what would have happened to Alfie after twenty years of living the same lifestyle. Caine's character in the more recent film was sad, obnoxious, and pathetic. And that seems about right. But for this one film, Alfie is still an amusing, if wrong-headed, bloke to get to know. My real rating for this film is probably a 3.5 out of five.

[The DVD contains a fine transfer of the film as well as subtitles that might prove useful if you have problems following Cockney, but otherwise, no features at all...]

Recommended: Yes

Viewing Format: DVD