Not 'alf Bleedin' Wonderful

...In his addresses to the audience (and he is inexhaustibly talking at us-even, gulpingly, out of embraces that are about to engulf him), he makes a refrain out of the laconic, confidential, complicity-making phrase "Know wot I mean...

...Every ingenuous or disingenuous look of that slightly bent face of his, every lustily sucked-on jujube or condescendingly tossed-off crumb of an utterance, every piece of braggadocio or deflation in his entire bearing, reveals the master...

...You don't know wot it or she is doin' this minute" Alfie has his brand of magnanimity, to be sure...

...She or it," Alfie obliges, "they're, all birds...

...Alfie calls women birds or bints, and the only pronoun they rate is "it...

...Alfie leaves her and runs into Siddie on the Embankment, but whether she will resume her dalliance with him is left an open question...

...And there was in the play a trifle less moralizing...

...after this, he does not need to...

...He is someone in whom good and bad are so thoroughly intermingled that moral values lose all meaning...

...The film ends with Alfie's puzzled monologue about the inscrutability of it all...

...In the film, aging, replaceability and bewilderment begin to cast their retributive shadows on Alfie-by way of that divine justice which, not visible in our lives, the movies take it upon themselves to dispense...

...But when, at film's end, he remarks, "Wot's it all about...

...He is a cheat and petty crook, but his two recurrent dictums are "Nobody don't 'elp you in this life-you gotta learn to 'elp yourself," and "If they don't get you one way, they get you another," and he wrests such juicy variations from these two verities, and believes them with such moral fervor, that you would find it hard to dispute him...

...in the most trivial and obvious he discovers the freshness, the mystery...

...It included some racy bits of dialogue that have been suppressed-though much that is almost as racy is still there, and not a little that is quite tart has been added...

...he has made use of the upward mobility of English society to the modest degree of progressing from truck-driving to the chauffeuring of limousines, snazzy dressing, and the extending of his real vocation, seduction, to the happy hunting grounds of the middle class...

...That the movie is not daringly, path-blazingly cinematic pales before the fact that there is hardly a moment in it without its scraggy but resilient corporeality, its peculiarly buttonholing charm...

...They might not to you, gal, but they do to me...

...It can also demonstrate and delight in encounters that the play could merely allude to, and it finds time for the introduction of a few lively new episodes, all of which work handsomely, except for a barroom brawl that is both cliche-ridden and out of keeping with the tone of the rest...

...Alfie proves that the systematic but loving examination of a contemporary individual-or type- never ceases to be of artistic interest, provided that the observation does not skimp on detail or try to know more than there is to know...

...although, at times, Alfie can be surprised: "Alfie, I says to myself, she's as uman as you are...

...The captious can find weaknesses in Alfie, some of them real enough, but none important...

...In the movie, Alfie finds himself sharing Ruby's opulently middle-aged favors with a guitar-strumming Mod...

...Bill Naughton, who adapted Alfie from his own play, knows the milieu and the men in it well...

...Last, and anything but least, there is Michael Caine...

...Not only is nothing human alien to him, none of it can ever be too familiar, either...

...But the movie version also has several advantages over the play...

...Alfie's continuous, and continually interrupted, confidences to the audience work even better than on the stage, partly because the director, Lewis Gilbert, is able to alternate them with off-screen narration (also by Alfie, and neatly flowing into his on-screen commentary), and partly because Gilbert finds ever new ways of staging and photographing Alfie's stream of asides...

...Only out of love could a small scrounger and mini-skirt chaser be made to seem so insidiously universal, neither bigger nor better than he is, but, as it were, truer than the trutn, more essential, more incontrovertible...

...And the various birds around him, however briefly we follow their flutterings, emerge as more than the usual smart stereotypes...

...challenged, Ruby explains that the chap is younger...

...For what birds "don't realize is that men are more sensitive than women...

...Alfie is not quite either of these...

...something of Naughton's enormous susceptibility to life and all its carriers makes every being he comes in contact with infectiously alive...

...In the play, Ruby is two-timing him with Lofty, the truck driver from whom he stole Annie, and both Lofty and Ruby invite Alfie to a bit of ménage à trois, from which he flees horrified...

...Thus, after relating a particularly nasty nightmare, he comments, "Alfie, I says to myself, if only you could get yourself to do summink good in your dreams, it wouldn't cost you nothink, an' you would get quite a bit of satisfaction out of it...

...And when he walks out on a friend's wife who is about to have an abortion-the baby, of course, would have been Alfie's-he explains, "I know it don't look nice-but wot do look nice when you get close up to it...

...Yet even as is, the film very nearly ran into censorship troubles...

...Alfie, the eponymous hero of the film, is a Cockney hedonist in his middle 30s...

...ON SCREEN By John Simon Not 'alf Bleedin' Wonderful The best comedy and the best serious film seen in New York so far this year happen to be one and the same: they are called Alfie, and they should please everyone but the most rabid avant-gardists to whom anything with plot, character and resemblance to life is anathema...

...It is able to take Alfie to the locales of his various deeds, and thus show him more immersed in action as well as illumine his relationship to his natural habitat...

...The existentially troubled soliloquy follows next, and the play concludes with Siddie, the adulterous wife from the parked car in the beginning, popping back into Alfie's car...

...Nothin' puts me off more'n a woman gettin' 'old of me with 'ard, 'orny mitts.' And watching her persist in her toiling, he muses, "Sometimes it gets a dead ghostified look come over its little face, as if it was all sick inside with love or summink, an' its poor bleedin' mind was stumblin' abaht lookin' for a corner to rest in.' "You can never know with a bird where it's bin, nor wot it's done," he tells a husband confined to a hospital bed...

...And there is here, as in all good comedies, a very genuine seriousness, even sadness, behind it all, as Alfie keeps acting out his compulsive pattern and, though accepting defeats almost as cheerily as victories, wondering what his life really comes to...

...It is a definitive performance, whose ultimate virtue is the beautiful sonorous compromise it brings about between Cockney speech and the next linguistic step up-and what jazzy, cajoling and jolting, cadences and turns of phrase that gives rise to...

...The acting is total, in that each line is delivered also by the face and body, and each glance and gesture leads into, out of, and beyond the corresponding words...

...Lewis Gilbert's direction, except for an occasional lapse into platitude, is forthright and blessed with a perky resourcefulness (mirabile visu, even Shelley Winters is kept under relative control), and Otto Heller's color photography knows when to court vulgar lushness to good effect, and when to remain homey and sober...

...Although the film is chiefly concerned with the amatory conquests and occasional setbacks of its hero, this does not reduce it to a mere catalogue of picaresque exploits...

...he was himself once a truck driver...

...The typical picaresque hero is either a good guy forced to resort to shrewdness to outwit a hostile world, or a heel who, nonetheless, has a redeeming feature or two...

...He tells Annie, a girl he has picked up on the road and who has moved in with him and slaves away for him-largely, to be sure, to forget another man-that she will ruin her hands by ceaseless scrubbing...

...More importantly, he was and is a human being, as every line of his play and film testifies...

...He is an abject coward, yet when it comes to subverting another, tougher man's girl under hazardous conditions, he rises to the occasion like any chevalier sans peur et sans reproche -self-reproach, that is...

...They don't matter," says she...

...He is a complete egoist, but he would genuinely like to see everybody happy, including the husbands whose wives he dabbles in...

...Less heavy weather was made of the abortion, and there was not, in the end, the implication that Alfie may be losing his grip...

...The others in the cast are all uncannily faultless, and most of the women have, as an extra gift, that wonderfully honest homeliness that only British actresses seem to have, and which, without major sacrifice of feminine appeal, stamps the characters with a painful veracity...

...Thus, in the play, Alfie emerges ultimately as a bit of a puritan (an amusing and profound insight), and the story ends with the adultery with which it began...

...Alfie has learned nothing, and therein lies the comedy or tragedy of his existence...

...Course it only goes to show- if they ain't got you when you're awake, they get you when you're ableedin' sleep...

...the words elicit from us, without the actor's having to do anything special with them, a great, tender, grieving sense of kinship...

...Or less...

...and adds his usual breezy "Know wot I mean...

...Nothing is thrown away, nothing clutched or brandished...

...The play had two advantages over the movie...

...Caine has done nothing of real significance before this...

...Would you mind saying 'she,'" the fellow retorts, "you're talking about my missis...

...Particularly since at least half the time he is proved right...

...In fact, Alfie would like to be good...

...And in a world of half-truths, isn't that close to being wholly right...

...Of one girl he says approvingly, "She's a standby and she knows it, and any bird wot knows its place in this life can be quite content...

...Caine's Alfie is more than a performance: an ambuscade for all critical reservations...

...It is as if a lifetime of apprehending and comprehending had gone into this creation...