The Italian Job (1969)

Peter Collinson's The Italian Job is one of the coolest movies ever made. Almost everything about it is "cool", or at least embodied what was "cool" in 1969. It's a slick, funny heist movie, a smart comedy, and an action movie all rolled into one. It has a score by Quincy Jones, one of the coolest composers ever. And let's face it, you don't get much cooler than 1960's Michael Caine (or now Michael Caine, for that matter).

Caine plays Charlie Croker, a career criminal just released from prison, who catches wind of a big heist in Italy from the widow of a deceased friend. He had the heist all planned out, but was executed by the Mafia in Italy before he could pull it off. Croker, with the help of a crime lord still in prison, assembles his own crew of specialists and getaway drivers to finish the Italian Job.

The heist involves them starting a traffic jam in Rome and robbing an armored car full of gold bricks in broad daylight. And they have to do it from right under the noses of the local authorities and the mafia.

Michael Caine is the greatest. He is so fun to watch in this movie, he gets tons of great one liners and exchanges with the other characters. Even though his character is a criminal, he's so charming and likeable that you want him to succeed.

The one weak link for me in the movie is the casting of Benny Hill. Now, I understand that even Benny Hill was considered cool back in England, 1969. But I just can't find him funny. He doesn't work for me. For what it's worth, I think he was really well cast, as the computer guy they enlist from a sanitarium. They imply he was a rapist or at the very least a sex offender, which is pretty appropriate for Benny Hill. But then they try to make him lovable, like these are just some wacky quirks he has. And yes, there is a scene where he squeezes a fat lady's butt and chases her around in fast motion.

The car chase at the end is one of the best ever, not far behind the one in The French Connection. It wins a lot of points for having the three getaway cars be mini coopers. The final scene is hilarious, and I'm not going to spoil it, because it's such a treat. I will say, I think it owes a little something to Henri-Georges Clouzot's The Wages of Fear.

The Italian Job is such a fun movie. It reminded me a lot of Steven Soderbergh. In fact, though I have never seen the original Sinatra Ocean's 11, I would not be surprised to learn that Soderbergh took more inspiration from The Italian Job for his remake. They have pretty much the same sense of style and humor. Check it out!

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.