Alfie

Michael Caine dominates the 1966-film Alfie, playing a cheeky cockney woman-chasing character who eventually comes to change his attitude towards life through a series of incidents.

Alfie loves women, but rarely gets emotionally involved with them. Women come and go in his life. He needs their love and companionship, but they are replaceable objects to him. He refers to them as 'it' or 'bird'. They are not people in their own right to him.

During the film, his health is threatened, he has a child who is adopted by another man, gets a married woman pregnant and must procure an abortion for her. When eventually he decides to settle down is rejected for a younger man. By the end of the story, he has learnt a thing or two.

Written by Bill Naughton - based on his own play - the script is excellent. Caine talks to the camera incessantly, often in the middle of conversations with other people. The camera becomes Caine's best friend. This device works particularly well. During one scene, he is having a medical examination that goes on for at least ten minutes and he talks to the camera throughout. A doctor keeps asking him questions, but Alfie just chats away to the camera, oblivious to the seriousness of his situation.

Michael Caine is excellent. Certainly not the nicest of people. His attitudes are deplorable, but he has a certain charm. And although it's very much Caine's film, there are also some excellent performances from a parade of 60s women (Jane Asher, Millicent Martin, Shirley Ann Field, Julia Foster, Shelly Winters).

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