But what do look nice, from up close?

Alfie (1966)

Crit

Interesting to watch this on the heels of Gran Torino; as in that film, we're presented with a protagonist of whose behavior and attitudes we deeply disapprove, but we can't resist feeling sympathy for the lonely plight that his benighted nature has brought on him. One big difference in this film, though, is that there is no implicit promise of redemption from the get-go, and no such redemption--or at least nothing readily identifiable as such--ever materializes.

Somehow I had never seen this before, though I saw the 2004 remake and found it a drag. The difference in part has to be Michael Caine vs. Jude Law, the former seeming genuinely and charmingly ignorant, the latter seeming simply arch. That may not be Law's fault, though: it's one thing to poke a camera into the face of an unhappy fact of your own era and of a proponent of that fact, which he fails to see as unhappy at all; under those circumstances you can occupy the moral high ground without denying sympathetic engagement with your subject. It's a lot harder to do anything positive with a gleeful antifeminist in this century. (The same may be true of the breaking of the fourth wall: Alfie's direct address of the audience seems cheeky in the early version, tired in the remake.)

Pleasant surprises (besides just liking the darned thing so much):

1. wonderful score by Sonny Rollins;
2. instead of the familiar Dionne Warwick vocal of the theme at the end, a new-to- Cher, produced by Sonny;
3. Jane Asher as one of Alfie's "birds"--in real life at this time she was Paul McCartney's bird (and muse).