This was the last film that my parents blocked me from seeing. Ironically, I was instead allowed to see Fellini's "La dolce vita" showing greater debauchery and callousness!

I eventually caught up with "Alfie." Michael Caine has made many, many movies (as he mentioned in both of his Academy Award acceptance speeches). After seeing him playing old, wise, and noble quite plausibly in "Cider House Rules," I was having trouble recalling the young, foolish, and selfish Caine. I confirmed my memory that he was a match for Laurence Olivier in "Sleuth," and then returned to "Alfie" on video. (He was also very good as the upper-class officer in "Zulu" even before  portraying Alfie and Harry Palmer.)

Although it is clearly a picture of a long gone era, "mod" London of the mid-1960s, when abortion was illegal, I thought the film held up well, so that it is not just a period piece. There are, most certainly, still seducers like Alfie taking more than they give (to borrow from the song which I kept waiting for and never heard!), condescending to the women who try to love them and smirking about them to others (in this case, the audience in close-to nonstop speaking by Caine directly to the camera).

The flight from commitment, the self-pity, the sexual selfishness, the assumption that males exist for pleasure and to be served have not vanished from the earth by any means, though I have not been in any circle where such blunt and casual sexism is expressed. (He does not even use human pronouns for his "bird": "it' rather than "she."; ashtrays into which to extinguish sexual cigarettes) Alfie is a type, practically a compendium of male selfishness lethally mixed with the raffish charm that is so useful to him in seduction — including attempted seduction of the audience into complicity with his behavior, and, worse still, his attitudes.

The lower-class Cockney who "don't speak proper" (poshly, that is), but who speaks incessantly, who is clawing his way up the social ladder and being used by those of higher status is also typical. Alfie is a sometimes chauffeur of a Rolls Royce and one of his "conquests" is a relatively well-off sexually voracious Shelly Winters. It turns out that he is, instead, one of her conquests and he finds that he can be as disposable as his conquests are.

And he is left all alone, watching his son call another man "Dad," horrified by the dead embryo of another never-to-be-born cjo;d in his kitchen, and brushed off by one of his married mistresses. I think his last line is the first line of the song: "What;s it all about?" Vice — which some would consider his sexual promiscuity, but I consider to be his instrumental use of others — is not rewarded in this movie.

Indeed, there is a cautionary tale about unwanted pregnancy that I'm sure my parents would have liked me to learn. (The emptiness of debauchery could also be inferred from "La dolce vita," but it looked so much more glamorous in Rome!) Denholm Elliot plays a grim and bitter abortionist whom anyone with any sense would want to avoid having recourse to.

Another reason I wanted to see the film again was to see Vivien Merchant, who was Harold Pinter's wife and played in the first productions of many of his greatest plays (including "Old Times" and "Homecoming," the two I consider his greatest) but did not make many films. She is wracked with guilt, quite unlike in the bold roles Pinter wrote for her. Even Alfie finds her brave dignity in the face of abasement touching.

Shelly Winters is also impressive in her last scene, trying not to hurt Alfie's pride, but when forced to answer the kind of question that should never be asked, delivers it with the appropriate cool candor.

The other less-known actresses also deliver flawless performances — more than a little masochism, but some spirit however slow to kindle. I especially liked the female physician, who, offhand, is I think the only woman in the film Alfie does not seduce, and the one he seems to be trying the hardest to seduce.

Michael Caine is superb. Likable? Not very, though I'd give him some credit for trying to minimize pain, even that which he administers. His attitudes are deplorable, and, ultimately, self-defeating, but Caine plays the part to the hilt and beyond. There is no doubt what Alfie is thinking, since he seems to speak to the camera more than to the other characters.

I don't think I would have taken him as a role model (nor Marcello Mastroianni's jaded journalist in "La dolce vita") and, at an impressionable age, would have been more likely to be frightened than enthralled, particularly by the pregnancy/abortion.

The music by Sonny Rollins is effectively understated. The title song is not sung at the end in the video I saw. Visually, the film is not remarkable. The acting, Caine's and his harem members, is remarkable.


Recommended: Yes