1966, England. Starring Michael Caine, Shelley Winters, Millicent Martin, Julia Foster, Jane Asher, Shirley Anne Field, Vivien Merchant, Eleanor Bron, Denholm Elliott, Alfie Bass, Graham Stark, Murray Melvin, Sydney Tafler. Directed by Lewis Gilbert. Available on DVD from Amazon

Something that was a little more successful at seeming hip in more or less the same era is 1966's biting British comedy Alfie, though I guess one should point out that the switch from 1966 to 1967 is one of those points in history where almost everything seems to change within a year. Still, considering Elvis was still cavorting with beatniks as late as 1967, we can allow a bit of wiggle room for our social epochs. If Easy Come, Easy Go was a breezy, almost absurdist slapstick comedy look at a counter culture, then Alfie is a much meaner, critical, and demanding comedy about a different culture, this time England in the swingin 1960s -- but don't let that or other people's misguided comments fool you. This is no movie about swinging London. It is, in fact, very much the opposite, and our hero is far away from the wild, carefree swingers of Carnaby Street.

Michael Caine, still fresh into his career as a leading man (despite many films prior to this, 1965's utterly superb Ipcress File was his first real leading role), stars as the titular character, a working class playboy who uses his considerable charms and charisma to seduce, use, and sometimes destroy a number of women. To relate it to some of the previous movies in this Parade, he's sort of the male interpretation of Brigitte Bardot's character in And God Created Woman. More malicious and deliberate in what he does and how he uses women, but also shockingly naïve about the negative consequences of what he does. "I don't mean to hurt people," he says in one scene, to which his friend responds, "But you do." Alfie's goals in life are simple. Seduce a woman, use her to get household chores done, maybe if she has money then buy him some sharp clothes or a new Rolls Royce, then ditch her as soon as he grows tired of her or can't think of another use for her.

He's nasty, selfish, mean, and yet played by Michael Caine in a way that is so disarming and devilishly charismatic that you can't help but smile at him, even as you're thoroughly disgusted by what he's doing to the people around him. Caine is astounding in his ability to make you understand how it is he's able to pull of the things he does, how he's able to make the women he targets fall for him. Again, in that sense, he has a lot in common with Bardot's And God Created Woman, though this film is infinitely superior to hers. Making it even easier to like Alfie even when he's being completely unsympathetic and despicable is the film's approach of having its lead character address the camera and b y virtue the audience directly. In these asides, he is frank, naïve, and trusting. He never comes across as malevolent; it's as if he totally lacks the part of his brain that can discern good from atrocious behavior. He's almost childlike even during the nastiest of indiscretions. And he's also frequently quite funny in his observations. He is, I suppose, that person everyone knows, the one you hesitate to call a friend, who constantly does things -especially in relationships - that you find utterly reprehensible. Yet there is something about him that is funny, maybe even a bit pathetic, and that makes you keep him around.

There are also little things he does that make him out to be less of a cad than he is. He's not the type to demand perfection in a woman, for instance, or profound physical beauty. Most of the women he pursues are not bad looking, but few of them are picture-perfect. "But I find I'm quite willing to overlook the odd blemish in a woman," he says to us, "providing she's got something to make up for it. Well, that's what we're all here for, innit - to help each other out in this life?" Still, when it comes to dealing responsibly with emotions beyond his own, Alfie is thoroughly unlikable. When he chases away the redheaded Annie and realizes he's made a mistake, it isn't because he's guilty over having crushed her feelings or used her. He's thinking about himself and his own comfort and feelings. When he gets an older married woman pregnant (a friend's wife, no less) and has to help her take care of the accident, the only way he can think of to deal with the situation, one that would make him face someone else's pain, is to take off for a walk and get away from things for a while. His return results in one of the film's most powerful dramatic moments, however.

And when he finally gets his comeuppance of sorts when his relationship with the older, wiser, and just as cynical Ruby is brought into focus, we wonder if he's come to some sort of realization about what he does to others, or if he's just feeling sorry for himself. He's not so much regretful or remorseful as he is bewildered byt he fact that what he thought was his common-sense, no-nonsense approach to sex and relationships in the midsts of the sexual revolution ended up going so terribly awry for him. He simply doesn't understand what went wrong, and so seems doomed to wander around in his confused and lonely state.

The approach to Alfie is the same approach that would make Michael Caine an icon. He's not, as I said, a swinging hipster. He dresses sharp but never outrageous, and he lives in a typical, modest, slightly cluttered and dingy apartment that reminds me quite a lot of Harry Palmer's apartment in The Ipcress File. In short, it looks like an actual apartment, like something where someone would actually live rather than like a pop-art experiment. The city he inhabits is similarly blue collar. Truck drivers and hustlers and lost young women and pubs. No wild orgies or clubs full of convulsing go-go girls in psychedelic body paint. Alfie lives, more or less, in the real world, making the movie a pretty stark reaction to the tendency in films of the era to really indulge - and often over-indulge - in the most hyperbolic aspects of underground culture. Again, I can't help but draw a comparison to Michael Caine's previous role of beleaguered British spy Harry Palmer in The Ipcress File, a movie made in response to the growing fantastic jet-set elements of the James Bond films (by Bond producer Harry Saltzman, no less) and determined squarely to place its spy in a realistic but no less intriguing world of having to fill out forms, deal with bureaucracy, and do the grocery shopping. Perhaps not coincidentally, Alfie director Lewis Gilbert would go on to direct James Bond films You Only Live Twice in 1969, The Spy Who Loved Me in '77, and the most fantastical and overblown of all James Bonds to date, 1979's Moonraker.

But here he and the story keep things firmly planted in reality, and this being a movie based on a play, characters and dialogue rule the day. Though beautifully shot, Alfie doesn't engage in any of the wild avant garde approaches to set and shot that were reflected in contemporaries like Blow Up. Where as that film focuses primarily on a single unlikeable, somewhat misogynistic lead character who says almost nothing and drifts through a highly stylized and almost dreamlike vision of London, Alfie takes the same sort of character in exactly the opposite direction on a similar journey for some meaning in life. In Blow Up, the quest was primarily artistic. For Alfie, his search is very much concrete and real world, just as his London looks like an actual city and not a fanciful interpretation of a city. Like Thomas in Blow Up, he seeks and fails to find comfort and fulfillment in material wealth and so wanders from one exploit to the next, desperate to keep himself rational and in control of a life that is slipping beyond his ability to guide.

Of course, central to the film is its examination of women and, more accurately, ever-evolving male attitudes toward women. It goes about the business of this discussion without ever relying on the obvious. The women in the story often aren't much better people than Alfie, too quick to allow themselves to be taken for a ride and too immature to responsibly handle their own lives. Alfie, likewise, is never so thoroughly demonized so as to become some cartoon character sketch of a vile and evil man. He's basically a regular Joe who just treats women poorly, not even so much because he doesn't like them as because he's just more interested in getting whatever he wants. Sexually, it's most potent stabd seems to be not at the sexist adventures of its title character, but instead at the sexual revolution notion, and indeed one of the pirmary notions of the 1960s, that if it feels good, do it and never mind the consquences. Such an attitude was born partially out of reaction to an era as sexualyl and morally repressive as the 1950s (in England, no less!), under the understanding of Newton's law that every action results in an equal and opposite reaction. The harder you repress a population, the wilder the counter-culture will be (look at the current Japanese underground as a recent example). The attitude also comes partially fromt he belief, fostered by Cold War paranoia and stoked byt he fires of social and political upheaval throughout the world, that we needn't worry about anything, because the world will be ending pretty soon. Alfie's question, then, becomes, "Okay, so if the world doesn't end, what are you going to do then?" In this sense, Alfie is less a critique of sexism and gender than it is a criticism of the emerging lack of responsibility in the youth of the nation - and this, my friends, is something we've seen come to frightening fruition in recent years, something that keeps Alfie disturbingly relevant nearly forty years after its initial release.

Because Blow Up was an art film and Alfie is a more logical character drama, the resolution of the film is more concrete. Alfie finds to his horror that he might actually be falling for one of his "birds," an attractive redhead he picks up in a roadside diner. His way of dealing with these feelings is, of course, to lash out at her. At the same time, he's feeling like he might want to settle down with a buxom, wild older woman played by Shelly Winters. Unlike the younger women, she's never taken in by Alfie's act but likes to have flings with him anyway. Naturally, just as Alfie is coming to think that this more seasoned, experienced, and less idealistic sort of woman might really be the dame for him, everything he's ever done is sort of turned back on him. Eventually, he turns to us and explains that through his use of women, he got money, sharp clothes, good meals, and even a car. "But I ain't got me peace of mind, "concludes Alfie, "and if you ain't got that, you ain't got nothing. I dunno. It seems to me if they ain't got you one way they've got you another. So what's the answer? That's what I keep asking myself - what's it all about? Know what I mean?"

Caine is at his best here. He's equal parts destroyer of women and genuinely innocent in regards to any knowledge regarding the repercussions of what he does. "My understanding of women only goes as far as the pleasure. When it comes to the pain I'm like any other bloke - I don't want to know." The dialogue with which he works, both when interacting to other characters as well as when speaking directly to the audience - crackles with wit without ever sounding the least bit stilted or false. As per Caine's calling card, he brings a down-to-earth sensibility to the character and what he says, so nothing that comes out of Alfie's mouth ever seems scripted or unrealistic. It's the sort of talk you'd expect from an actual bloke. Not always smart, sometimes hovering on the verge of insight without ever letting Alfie come to a full-fledged revelation. Caine's supporting cast is up to his standard as well, especially Shelly Winters as the playful older female match for Alfie.

Despite the tidier wrap-up than the more oblique Blow Up, Alfie still leaves you with plenty of questions and ideas to ponder. It never says anything as patronizing as "Alas, if only I'd settled down and been good!" It's unclear exactly what lesson Alfie has learned, if he's learned anything at all, and in the end he's still just thinking about himself. Will he be different from now on, or is his attitude toward women so stunted that he's hopeless? The answer is less important than the question.

Labels: Drama, Netflix Diary, Stars: Michael Caine, Year: 1966