Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Alfie
1966 · Lewis Gilbert · Alfie on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch Alfie turn from the scene to talk straight to you. (structure)
Every few minutes Alfie breaks off the action to confide in the camera, editorializing and boasting about the woman beside him before turning back to the scene.
Payoff: Being made his confidant is how the film gets you to like him before it asks you to judge him. In the reading: the mental-image. Deleuze calls this kind of image a relation-image, one whose meaning depends on you, the knowing third party.
Count how many women Alfie moves through without changing at all. (structure)
The film is a chain of separate affairs, Siddie, Gilda, Lily, Ruby, each cut as its own episode with no throughline pulling Alfie forward.
Payoff: The drifting structure is the point, a life of conquest that goes nowhere and changes no one. In the reading: voyage-balade-form. Deleuze calls this drifting, weakly linked chain of episodes a voyage or balade, a trip that changes nothing.
Notice the shift between London streets and Alfie's frontal asides. (camera)
Heller shoots the streets, flats, and embankment in a grounded, documentary mode, then switches to a composed, frontal setup whenever Alfie turns to confide in the lens.
Payoff: The two camera modes mark the difference between his real life and the story he is telling about it.
Listen for Sonny Rollins's saxophone under the comedy. (sound)
Rollins's loose, melancholy jazz plays beneath the jokes and seductions, giving scenes a mournful undercurrent the dialogue does not admit to.
Payoff: The music already knows the swagger is hollow before Alfie does.
Watch Caine modulate between charm and something colder underneath. (performance)
Caine plays Alfie glib and self-justifying enough to keep you watching, while letting small cracks of loneliness show through without ever signaling the shift.
Payoff: The performance asks you to like him and judge him at the same time.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch how the turns to camera make you complicit in what you're about to judge.