Alfie Elkins (Michael Caine) is a rambunctious playboy patrolling the streets of London, charming every woman he meets, and making sure that they’re fully aware of how he can be a better lover to all of them, which is often used as a defence to convince his married cohorts to take the chance to sample from his rich source of youthful vibrancy, which they all universally agree they can’t get from their more dull, vapid husbands. Alfie is not too concerned about the feelings of his partners, asserting what he believes to be his inherent right as a young man to demand they give him what he’s seeking, and rarely spares their feelings, particularly when it comes to the inevitable question of commitment. He leaps between partners, some of them women he’s known for a while that jump at the chance to spend an evening or two with this eligible bachelor or the occasional stranger who always seems to be able to offer something to Alfie, whether it’s their bodies, their money or the undying commitment that they show to a man whose behaviour often borders on abusive, unable to move out of his domineering control, as every time they try and escape, he returns with another bundle of promises and a set of demands that these easily-persuaded women seem to be unable to deny, finding his penniless London playboy to be the most irresistible bachelor strutting the streets. However, he soon discovers that he isn’t going to be able to maintain his philandering ways for much longer, as he is about to face the consequences of his actions, such as the realization that women are not merely vessels for his desires, and that they won’t be so easy to fall for his roguish charms for much longer. Fatherhood, disease and betrayal all start to find their way into Alfie’s relationships, and it’s only a matter of time before he realizes the true scope of his actions, and has to pay the price for his inappropriate, flippant behaviour.

Despite being considered something of a cultural touchstone, there are few films that have aged more poorly than Alfie. This is a film that, based on the many ideas it was composed of, should have been a resounding success – its a London-based comedy set during the sexual revolution when film was able to be more provocative than ever, and the work that made Michael Caine a household name after a few years of dedicated work that went almost entirely unrecognized by the public. This isn’t even mentioned how the film was shepherded by Lewis Gilbert, an unremarkable but solid director who made some wonderful films over the course of his career. Alfie is a film that had so much promise, and there is no doubt that it was something of a cue at the time of its release – however, half a century later, the film had aged without even an iota of the intelligence that it claims to possess, being a heavily-dated, overly-sentimental attempt at comedy that says nothing of value, even when touching on some themes that should technically remain quite timely in a contemporary context, as this was one of the pioneering works that looked explicitly at issues such as abortion, mental health and infidelity, without making light of these serious matters. While it stands as an important film in terms of being the platform Caine needed to ascend to the status of the counterculture icon he became as a result of this film, Alfie is an otherwise misguided work of imbalanced cultural ramblings that seems to be deluded enough to think that it is actually philosophical, instead of a muddle of false starts, despicable characters and truly insidious storytelling that never quite reaches the impossibly high standard it seems to believe itself to be capable of.

One of the more objective merits of Alfie, albeit one that doesn’t allow it to overcome some of its more notable shortcomings, is that it is an effective time-capsule of London in the 1960s, which has become somewhat romanticized in retrospect, with the post-war boom of music, fashion and libertine ideals being particularly appealing in looking back at the decade. Alfie, but virtue of being a film made in London during this time, takes on many of the glamourous qualities we associate with the period and thus gives us insight into the period. Certainly not intentionally stylish (and those that view Alfie as some sort of vogue masterpiece may have seen something in this film that was simply not all that prominent or purposeful), the film does give the audience a glimpse into this period through simply being a representation of a particular time and place in the past that has been elevated to almost folkloric status. It may be interesting, but that’s certainly not intentional on the part of the film, which seems as singularly uninterested in representing the period as it did giving us a good story. Taking the cue from the novel and play of the same title, one of the few merits of Alfie is how it captures the trends and passes them to subsequent audiences, being an insular bundle of period-specific details such as fashion, dialect and music. There’s a lot of style in this film, and Lewis Gilbert does very well to put together a fascinating tapestry of the era, one that may not be all that visually stunning, nor all that interesting but does partially satiate the desire to see true glimpses into the period, to sample the general aesthetic and see how life was lived back then. In this regard, Alfie is relatively successful, although there are other issues that keep it from ever being anything other than hopelessly mediocre at best.

So much has been rhapsodized about Alfie in terms of its status as the star-making vehicle for Michael Caine – and such an assertion is utterly bewildering since I’d doubt anyone would watch this film and find Caine to be anything other than utterly deplorable. Watching Alfie today is something of a challenge since we are well-aware of where Caine’s career would go after this, where he’d become the lovable Cockney everyman in anything from neo-noirs to subversive genre films, and how he flourished into one of the most enduring and beloved actors of his generation. Alfie Elkins is not the character we’d expect from him, so it almost appears out of pocket for him to play such a despicable character, and unlike even his most morally-ambigious characters in films like Get Carter and The Italian Job, Alfie possesses virtually no charm and exists as simply the embodiment of what is now referred to as toxic masculinity. While the film rightly doesn’t attempt to humanize him, and he does receive the comeuppance he deserves, it is still complicit in the dreadful tendency that a few works have employed over time, where they falsely believe that being a despicable human being is a character trait and that it somehow makes the text more relatable if someone with flaws occupies the central role. Caine is an undeniably charming actor, but even his inherent vigour is horribly subdued by a film that cares less about Alfie as a character and focuses more on channelling some awful social commentary into the role. It simply doesn’t work and results in a character who is abusive, manipulative and borders on psychopathy, whose punishment is simply to be rejected by all the women he loves and forced to seek out other means of funnelling his patriarchal beliefs onto some other unsuspecting victim. Caine does his best, but it’s to no avail when the film around him is just far too uninterested to develop the character in any meaningful or authentic way.

Alfie is a bundle of Swinging Sixties curiosities that puts together many of the eccentricities of the period it was covering. The problem comes in the fact that there was additional space in the package, so some of the dominant mentalities of the period were included, which is the precise reason why this film is an enormous failure. There have been works that seek to explore a certain period by evoking more serious discussions and employing more uncomfortable topics. However, Alfie is so overcome with its own perceived brilliance, it believes the audience will forgive its insidious intentions. An important lesson that many filmmakers often learn the hard way is that it is never appropriate to just infuse your film with horrible events if you don’t have any sense of logic or intention to work through this issues to find some deeper meaning. This film is filled with one horrifying moment after another – infidelity is widely accepted, there’s a harrowing subplot where the titular character may have cancer, followed by a stay in a mental institution, and finally an extended storyline about an illegal abortion. All of these issues are fascinating and very timely and could’ve been profoundly moving had they been explored by a film that actually wanted to make a statement, rather than using them as plot devices to give nuance to a character that simply didn’t deserve such a platform. Difficult and controversial subjects are only acceptable when some effort is putting into them, rather than the lifeless, almost insulting, portrayal employed by this film, which treats the subjects and the individuals through which they’re channelled, with something very close to thorough contempt. The film may not be intentionally sinister – by all means, it appears to believe itself to be some revolutionary comedy about difficult issues. It unfortunately just falls victim to an approach that simply did a great disservice to an incredibly promising premise, which is why Alfie is something of an unmitigated failure in numerous different ways and squanders its potential at nearly every available opportunity. As the song that ends the film asks, “what’s it all about, Alfie?” – I would like to know that myself.