Alfie
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Movie Reviews of Alfie
Movie Review: ALFIE!
Summary: 4 Stars
Altoghter now..."What's it all about...ALFIE?" This 1966 film directed by LEWIS GILBERT stars MICHAEL CAINE as Alfie, a wonderfully shallow WOMANIZER who is trying to figure out what life is, well, all about! Actually this is an excellent SATIRE of the SWINGING SCENE in England in the SIXTIES! Also featuring SHELLEY WINTERS and DENHOLM ELLIOTT, along with MILLICENT MARTIN, JULIA FOSTER and JANE ASHER as the women left in Alfie's WAKE! Unfortunately, there are NO EXTRAS besides the trailer on this DVD, because this film deserves more than the bare minimum treatment!Movie Review: An Opposite number
Summary: 4 Stars
Don't let the cover fool you. This is actually a great one for the guys. Sure there is a moral you observe under a rye grin. Alfie gets it in the end but he has a lot of fun on the way. Basically the opposite number of the notorious college girl movie Breakfast at Tiffanys. That is if they hadn't tacked on the happy ending and George Pepard had split on the lovely head case. It also doesn't have Micky Rooney which is always a plus. "What is that you say, If you lie and mess people around all the time you lose them? Who would have thunk it!"Movie Review: Caine Is Perfect
Summary: 4 Stars
Michael Caine makes his career with this excellent profile of a '60s cockney womanizer. You despise him but can't turn away from his extremely charismatic performance.Movie Review: Sex Addict
Summary: 3 Stars
I saw this one back in the 60's and remembered it. It was a young man's dream-comes-true on screen and pretty racy after the Hollywood Film Code collapsed. However, my head was full of mush back then because clearly, I missed all the sadness in this story of the rogue cockney and his ladies. The year of the film, 1966, is significant because swinging London was happening and mini-skirted tarts roamed London with Rolling Stone bad boys. Alfie is a 30ish fellow that was of the pre-60's generation of Hugh Hefner, 1950's wanna-be's. He loves them and leaves them. Alfie is a good talker and his young pregnant girlfriend loves his abusive banter. Alfie is amusing and there's plenty of mid-sixties sex jokes, double meanings, but all the tough guy-docile female antics are dated. These quaint attitudes are an archeological dig of pre-feminism. There is an exception. Shelley Winters is terrific as the hot-to-trot American widow that gives Alfie more than he bargained for.
There is a backroom abortion scene, which horrified my wife and I. We saw it differently. Alfie has a stint in a hospital ward and befriends a middle-class fellow who lives for his once a day visit, his dowdy wife. You guessed it: Alfie beds Dowdy wife (wonderful Vivian Merchant ) and the pregnancy must be terminated. The uncharacteristic abortionist asks questions of morality. The woman has a rough one and the aborted baby haunts Alfie. I thought these scenes rang of anti-abortion sentiment. My wife said it was pro-abortion because now women can have abortions in clean clinics.
Michael Caine was wonderful in the role that made him a star. He talks to the movie audience directly and we are amused and disgusted at the same time. Today we would call this fellow a Peter Pan and get him off to a sex addict group meeting.
Movie Review: Excellent performance from Michael Caine
Summary: 3 Stars
What's ALFIE all about? If you were to ask the principle character he'd probably say freedom. Moving from one "it" (his term for girl - almost an abstraction) to another - no commitments or attachments and only an "honest" assessment that love is illusory or at best fleeting and therefore "the moment" is king. Alfie is caught in the crossfire of birth and death and refuses to confront either because he cannot understand the relationship of the past and future to his present. Alfie is the eternal mischievous boy who has charmed his way in and out of trouble (and women's underwear) his entire existence. An astute observer of the folly and frailty of human emotion, he is content to remain on the outside, unaware that there might be something of value superseding immediate gratification. As the film progresses, Alfie's charm is wearing thin and he starts experiencing the fallout from his years of shallow depravity. On those rare occasions when he chooses to confront the unfortunate but inevitable consequences of his behavior, he is disgusted and ashamed but ultimately unable to put these feelings of revulsion into a context and therefore continues his detached existence in ignorance. But he's no longer funny. In fact, by the films close, Alfie has become painfully sad. A flawed film in many ways (the ludicrous bar-room brawl comes to mind), ALFIE nevertheless succeeds primarily due to Michael Caine's performance. His ability to take the audience with him, as co-conspirators, in a lascivious game that is both intoxicating and shameful is remarkable. Unfortunately, while the emptiness of his character has had a sobering effect on us, Alfie has learned nothing of the experience and helplessly asks us, "What's it all about?"