What's It All About...? (Alfie (DVD))

Member Name: Mad_Wicca

Product:	Alfie (DVD)
Date:	11/09/01 (220 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: A classic film, Micheal Caine at his best, A host of superb cameos

Disadvantages: A pointless fight scene involving everyone in the pub

Alfie Elkins (Michael Caine) is a wideboy cockney with a mouthful of charm and an eye for the ladies. Any ladies. Short or tall, rich or poor, married or single, big or small, blonde, brunette or red-head. If it's got a pulse and is of the female persuasion Alfie sees it as fair game. He walks in and out of their lives, leaving broken hearts, children and trouble in his wake.

However, for all this you can't help but like Alfie. You may not agree with some of the things he does or says, but there's just something about those unblinking, long lashed eyes and that sparingly used, sparkling smile that draws you to him. Alfie lives by his own rules, he may change them at the drop of a hat, but they're *his* rules and if you don't like them Alfie couldn't care less. Cars, money, clothes and women are Alfie's business, in that order.

As Alfie philosophises, 'Nobody don't help you in this life. You got to help yourself.' And help himself Alfie does. First there's pushy Siddie (Millicent Martin), a married woman who's 'on her way out' because she wants Alfie to meet her husband at her works dance, 'Once I've met the husband, it seems to put me right off the wife.'

Next comes gullible Gilda (Julia Foster). She's what Alfie calls a 'second bird', not good looking or smart enough to be taken out, but handy for a home-cooked meal and a night between the sheets. The thing is, Alfie has a rival for Gilda's affections, Humphrey (Graham Stark), a bus conductor who adores her and wants to marry her.

Even so, Alfie thinks Humphrey is so drab and boring that he'll always have Gilda hanging on his every word. And for a time he does, but when the couple have a child together, things between them change. Alfie does nothing to help her with the birth or the rearing of their son, turning out to be a reluctant father who only grows to adore the child over his infreque
nt visits. When Gilda realises she has to make a choice between Alfie and Humphrey, for the sake of her child's future, events are taken out of Alfie's hands.

During and after all this Alfie still has plenty of other women to keep him company. There's rich Ruby (Shelley Winters), who owns three hairdressing salons and a posh flat with a mirrored bathroom ceiling, and Alfie thinks he's landed on his feet. The waif like Annie (Jane Asher) he pinches from right under a mates nose. Annie has run away to London to get over a lost love and, although she can't get this other man out of her mind, settles down to looking after Alfie. For a time Alfie loves this almost domesticated life, that is until all her cooking and cleaning starts to make him feel 'poncified'.

When he has a health scare (‘A shadow? On me lung? God in ‘eaven ‘elp me!’) Alfie is sent to a hospital in the country to rest, but even here he still finds time to have some fun with one of the nurses (Shirley Ann Field) and a quick fling with another patient's wife (Vivien Merchant). It's this quick fling with the married Lily that comes back to haunt him when she turns up at his flat pregnant and needing an abortion.

What follows is a harrowing, brilliantly acted dark drama, that is in stark contrast to the fun, swinging 60's we've been party to so far. Denholm Elliot's cameo as a nervous backstreet abortionist is outstanding; as is Caine's reaction to the discovery of the dead foetus in his kitchen. The viewer is shown nothing, the actuality of what lies on Alfie's kitchen bench conveyed only through Caine's horror struck face.

Alfie was Michael Caine's first starring role and, with the clever concept of having Alfie 'talk' to the viewer with witty little offsides that the other characters seem totally unaware of, he draws you, over the course of the film, into his world. You beco
me Alfie's confidant as he reveals his deepest thoughts and feelings, which ultimately has you on his side.

His constant referral to woman as 'it' or 'bird' can seem a little shocking to us in this, the 21st century; but it also shows Alfie for the type of man he is, the type that many men were back then. By not seeing a woman as a real person he prevents himself becoming too attached to her, moving easily from one to the other with no bruising of the conscience. As Alfie himself admits, 'My understanding of women goes only as far as the pleasures.'

Where Alfie to have been set in 2001 it would never have worked. Like Mike Myers popular creation Austin Powers he would not have been able to handle the PC world of here and now, and also like Mr. Powers he would have been portrayed as a comic character, outdated and something to be laughed at.

The one thing you have to keep in mind whilst watching this film is that the year is 1966, men are men and women are there to provide pleasure and clean socks. The Sixties may have had the summer of love, hippies and bra burning, but the Sixties that we are shown in Alfie is far removed from these events, its roots firmly buried in the moral ethics of the Fifties. What we see is the day to day grind of the normal working man and woman, the struggle to keep going, to fathom out what it's all for; what it's all about.

In an interview in the Daily Sketch from 1966, Caine said of the film, 'I want people to feel violently after they walk out of this film. Not just say, "Yes, a pleasant little laugh but why the abortion in the middle?"...I wouldn't have accepted the script if I hadn't seen a real theme saying something in it.'

The film contains many wonderful performances, not only from it's main star, but also from a long list of top class Sixties actors, including those already mentioned as well as Eleanor Bron, Alfie Bas
s, Murray Melvin, Sydney Tafler and Peter Graves. A brilliantly witty script from Bill Naughton, beautiful direction by Lewis Gilbert (who insisted on using actual London locations such as the Elephant and Castle, Westminster Bridge, the Victoria Embankment, the Old Kent Road, Tower Bridge, Waterloo Station, Battersea Park and Hyde Park), and an unforgettable musical score from Burt Bacharach and Sonny Rollins only add to the evocation of an era long gone but, nevertheless, well worth a visit.

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