Alfie · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

He keeps turning to look at you. A chauffeur in another man's borrowed car, a working-London charmer on the Thames embankment, and every minute or so Alfie Elkins swivels off the scene he's in to confide — to the lens, to you — what he really thinks of the bird beside him. Michael Caine invented something there the British cinema hadn't quite had: a hero who narrates his own seduction as a running commentary, glib and intimate, so that watching the film feels like being let in on it. That confiding is the engine. It's also the trap.

Start with what kind of film Alfie thinks it is. For most of its length it runs on what Deleuze called the movement-image — the cinema, dominant since Griffith, in which a person perceives a situation and acts to change it, and one act leads cleanly to the next. Alfie sees a woman, wants her, acts, conquers, moves on. Each affair is a discrete unit, cut as its own little movement, and the picaresque chain just accumulates: Siddie, Gilda, Lily, the convalescent nurse, Ruby. But notice what the chain doesn't do. It goes nowhere. Nobody is transformed, least of all Alfie; he ends roughly where he began, a little older, asking the river what it was all for. Deleuze had a name for exactly this slackening — the voyage or balade, the trip that changes nothing, the episodic drift of weakly linked situations he saw as the first symptom of the crisis of the action-image. The sensory-motor machine still turns over, but it's idling. Alfie acts and acts, and the acting resolves nothing.

Then the machine seizes. The pivot is the backstreet abortion — Lily, married, pregnant; the kitchen-table procedure; the abortionist's clinical detachment; and afterward Alfie alone with the small dead thing his evasions have produced. Here the film crosses, for a few minutes, into the time-image. Alfie can't act his way out. He can only look. Deleuze's term is the pure optical situation — the opsign — a moment so saturated with reality that the character, and we, are reduced to seeing, with no action available to discharge the feeling. The seducer who has spent the whole film doing becomes, in front of the foetus, a seer: someone who endures an image instead of mastering it. The tears that follow aren't his usual performance, because for once there's nobody to perform to. The camera he's been courting can't help him.

This is why the direct address is more than a charming gimmick lifted from Tom Jones's winking rake. Deleuze would file it under the relation-image — the kind of image whose meaning lives in a relation the viewer holds, with the audience installed as a knowing third party. Alfie's asides make us his confidant. We get his self-image first, in his own flattering edit, and then the film quietly shows us the gap between that edit and his conduct. We're the ones holding both versions at once. That's the moral mechanism: complicity, then the withdrawal of complicity, managed so finely by Caine that you never catch the shift being signalled. It makes Alfie something close to what Deleuze called the forger — a man forever forging a self in the telling, narrating a life the events keep contradicting. His commentary is a falsifying narration. The smasher-with-the-birds coexists with a loneliness the same voice keeps leaking, and the film never lets you settle which Alfie is the true one, because the not-settling is the point. He is caught, in Deleuze's phrase for such figures, in the act of legending himself.

Place it for a second. Alfie belongs to the British New Wave's Bazinian wing — the faith that a frank camera pointed at real London (cramped flats, pubs, convalescent homes, the grain of Techniscope on the exteriors) tells a truth studio gloss can't. It inherits the predatory working-class climber from Room at the Top, the unrepentant hedonist creed from Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, the New Wave's unsentimental staging of abandoned pregnant women from A Taste of Honey, and the to-camera libertine from Tom Jones. Its real invention is to take that winking address — pure comedy in Tom Jones — and weaponize it, so the confession becomes the very thing that indicts the confessor. Billy Liar privileged a fantasist's inner world; Alfie externalizes it into literal speech and then turns it against the speaker. The Bacharach song asks aloud the question the film can't answer in words — what's it all about? — and Sonny Rollins's saxophone, loose and melancholy under the comedy, already knows the swagger is hollow.

What did it do to film? It found a way to make a popular entertainment perform its own critique — to let an audience love a man and judge him with the same gesture, years before that doubleness became common currency. Watch it again for the turns to camera. Count how long Alfie can keep looking at you. The film ends the moment he can't.