Movie more Effective than Stage Play

By Bosley Crowther – Aug 25, 1966 – The New York Times (archives)

My cmnt: I’ve always liked the words to the song “Alfie” from the film by the same name (sung beautifully by Cher at the end of the film and then later by Dione Warwick in a better received version). I’ve never seen the movie. Wikipedia has a comprehensive overview of the film if you’re interested and below I’ve included a transcript of the NYT’s review (I am a paid subscriber to the Times).

My cmnt: Why I have posted this here is the interesting point made by Crowther that the heart rending abortion scene near the end of the film is “a miserable and tragic thing“. Where today he would be booted off the Times and castigated by democrats for daring to say the truth about abortion. Oh how times have changed.

“NOBODY don’t ‘elp you in this life. You gotta ‘elp yourself.”

Such is the philosophy of Alfie, the self-serving Cockney sport in the British comedy-drama titled “Alfie,” which came to the Coronet and the Embassy 46th Street yesterday. And it’s the ice-water aspect of Alfie generously helping himself to life’s available pleasures, mainly compliant “birds”—those being females under 40—that is the joy and vexation of this film.

I say vexation with caution, hoping it will not distract any reader from anticipating “Alfie” with a positive and eager attitude. It is mentioned to serve as notice that there is in this seemingly blithe film an annoyance of large proportions in the principal character.

For Alfie is not a hero. He is not even a very nice gent, for all the breeziness of his manner, all the casualness of his cheek and all the easy and appealing good humor with which he is played by Michael Caine—doing a nice switch, incidentally, from the different character he plays in the current “The wrong Box,” and likewise from the odd type he was in “The Ipcress File.”

He’s a taker—a curiously unconscious and essentially brutal egoist. He lets the stray “birds” serve him, and they do, like gentle slaves, fetching and carrying for him, tending his shabby East End flat, looking at him with love-light and gratifying his casual appetites.

There’s the meek little Gilda, Julia Foster, whom he carelessly gets with child and then keeps on through her confinement and after the child is born. He likes her, he grows fond of the toddler, he is comfortably satisfied. But Gilda finally has to leave him for marriage and security—and he doesn’t really care.

Then there’s Siddie (Millicent Martin), a fly-by-night, two-timing wife, and Annie (Jane Asher), a waif from the midlands whom he steals from a truck driver and lets go. And there’s Ruby (Shelley Winters), a brassy and well-heeled extrovert who takes as much of a fall out of Alfie as he takes out of her.

But mainly—and most profoundly—there is Lily (Vivien Merchant), the dutiful wife of a nervous friend (Alfie Bass) whom Alfie meets while in hospital. And it is a mild seduction of Lily one afternoon while he is driving her home that brings Alfie to the grave calamity that lets us sense what a heel he is.

There must be an abortion—a miserable and tragic thing, which Lewis Gilbert, who produced and directed, makes us sense in all its shabbiness and shame. But it is the performance of Miss Merchant as the woman brought to this shame, stunned and saddened by the necessity, deadened by her grief, that shocks us into feeling contempt for Alfie—and all the free-wheeling Alfie’s in this world.

The film, smartly done by Mr. Gilbert, is from Bill Naughton’s script and stage play. The play was much less intense and absorbing, when it was done on Broadway. A neat trick of having Alfie speak directly to the audience from time to time, make predictions and explanations, involves one more entertainingly and adds to the wit and insolence of the character.

The whole thing is played expertly by everyone in the large cast, and a lively jazz score and bright color make it seem much more casual than it is.

ALFIE, screenplay by Bill Naughton; based on his stage play of the same title; directed and produced by Lewis Gilbert for Paramount.

A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 25, 1966 of the National edition with the headline: Screen: ‘Alfie,’ Story of a Cockney Anti-Hero, Begins Run Here:Movie More Effective Than Stage Play Other Features Open ‘Batman’ Has Debut. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

My cmnt: Here’s an ad on the same page as the archived NYT’s review of “Alfie”:

My cmnt: I include it because I had never heard of Gefilte Fish before I saw the movie bloopers at the end of Rush Hour (1,2 or 3) with Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker. No matter how many takes they could never get Tucker to correctly pronounce Gefilte Fish.