Alfie

I didn't know very much about Alfie before I saw it. I expected it to be a swinging 60's comedy about a charming ladies' man blah blah blah. It really wasn't that. It was something so much better. This movie actually comes down really hard against Alfie's choice of lifestyle.

Alfie, played by Michael Caine in one of his career defining roles, only thinks he's a charming ladies' man. He drifts from woman to woman, ditching them without a moment's thought if they show any signs that they're growing attached. His perceived perfect life begins to show cracks when one of his girls gets pregnant. Against his better judgment, she keeps the kid, and he finds himself acting as a weekend dad. He takes to it for a while, but is still unwilling to commit to the kid's mother, and is thus kicked out of the relationship. Not long after that, a health scare gives Alfie his first glimpse at his own mortality, which only persuades him to continue his attachment-free lifestyle with even more reckless abandon.

Caine as Alfie is all bravado. He acts cocky and confident, and addresses the camera like he has all the answers. He is a man without any respect, for women (he dehumanizes them by calling them 'birds' or even referring to them as 'it'), for other men, for social structures, or for himself. He constantly breaks the fourth wall and even basically tells the opening credits to fuck off, showing us that he has no respect for the established rules of moviemaking either.

How can anyone respect a man without any respect? They can't, and it's a slap in the face for Alfie when that fact is bluntly laid out before him. We as the audience can't respect Alfie, either. Instead, he's an object of pity, a shallow man who runs away from everything of substance ever presented to him.

This was the first time I had ever seen young Michael Caine at work. I think the oldest Caine film I had ever seen before this was Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. You can see how he became such a huge star. Just like the women he seduces, Alfie draws you in with his superficial charm and wit, then pushes you away with his crass and insensitive behavior towards others.

Lewis Gilbert directed Alfie, and it's quite an accomplishment, though I find it fascinating and a bit confusing that he would make a movie decrying this sort of lifestyle and follow it up with You Only Live Twice, in which James Bond lives pretty much exactly the same way, but with none of the consequences.

In the end, after hurting a lot of people with his selfish ways, Alfie himself suffers a series of personal blows, and you could say he learns a lesson, but the movie doesn't tell you for sure if he has changed his behavior for good. He's not a young man, and he's pretty set in his ways, and it may be too late for him.

Alfie (the movie, not the character) is funny, thoughtful, and full of compassion. Not only compassion for the women who fall victim to Alfie's charms. There's even a little compassion left over for Alfie himself, who thinks he has all the answers, but really has not a one.

You Only Live Twice

Welcome to another installment of my series of James Bond reviews in chronological order. If you would like to read my previous entries, please follow the links: Dr. No, From Russia with Love, Goldfinger, and Thunderball.

You Only Live Twice is the fifth James Bond film, again starring Sean Connery as 007. It's directed by Lewis Gilbert, a newcomer to Ian Fleming's universe. It quite literally rockets past Thunderball as the most expensive, and the most excessive, James Bond film up to this point. I chose the above poster to represent this movie in order to prove that point. Yes, there's a sequence where Q assembles a sweet ass portable helicopter for Bond, followed by a big crazy helicopter dogfight. And that's not all!

This time around, Bond, after faking his death in order to get off of SPECTRE's hit list, is sent to Japan to investigate a stolen spacecraft that landed in the Pacific nearby. A stolen spacecraft. See, Spectre is trying to escalate the cold war by using their own, larger spacecraft to eat American and Russian spacecrafts and have each country cast the blame on the other.

This is actually a pretty important James Bond film for a few reasons. First and foremost, we are introduced to 007's arch-nemesis, evil mastermind Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Donald Pleasance), seen in 3 of the previous 4 films as only a pair of hands stroking a cat. We are also introduced to his secret evil mastermind headquarters located inside a volcano. This is the reason villains always build bases inside volcanos! The base itself served as the inspiration for Dr. Evil's base in the first Austin Powers film.

There's a lot more silliness to go around in this movie, including a scene where Bond has his face "altered" to look Japanese. He has some prosthetic eyelids put on and brushes his hair forward. The effect is less than impressive. The finale is also pure craziness, where Bond and an army of NINJAS invade Blofeld's volcano base! This is a dream come true. It was also parodied brilliantly in You Only Move Twice, my personal all-time favorite Simpsons episode, guest starring Albert Brooks as loveable-boss-slash-diabolical-terrorist, Hank Scorpio.

As ridiculous and over the top as You Only Live Twice gets, it's probably the most fun of the first five. Not the BEST, mind you, and also not my favorite, but it's loaded with action and camp value. The script is written by Roald Dahl, best known for childrens books like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Fantastic Mr. Fox, and he brings a level of cleverness to the story that balances out the ridiculousness.

It only took a few movies, but by this point there is absolutely no attempt to ground James Bond in any kind of reality. You Only Live Twice is pure escapism, and I can't fault it for that.

James Moore will be back with his review of ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE.