We’re talking about the original 1966 film Alfie, not last year’s example of how Hollywood generally can’t leave well enough alone. The broad strokes are the same, except this one’s set in London and stars Michael Caine, still young enough to be on the barely muscular side of pretty boy pretty. Another difference, and this is important, is that 1965 London is filled with people just barely over the recovery from World War II and into an economic boom. Class is still important but not so much that Caine can’t bluff his way around it.

Everyone knows the punchline to the theme song: “What’s it all about, Alfie?” That’s also the theme of the movie, the journey which Caine’s character takes. Women can barely resist Alfie’s charms, despite the harsh, careless way he treats them, but the less pleasure he takes from them. One woman loves him so much she has his child, cooks and cleans for him, though he never marries her or makes a commitment to the boy and eventually walks away.

Director Lewis Gilbert (who also helmed three James Bond flicks) shows Alfie often enough what he’s missing through all this. A father’s love for a son, a husband’s love for his wife, a wife’s heartbreak over betrayal, but all Alfie wants is the pleasure. One can only presume that as a child his parents or father left him (died in the war?) but Bill Naughton’s script, adapted from his stage play, never goes there. To me this is fine, we can infer what we like and aren’t spoonfed every little detail that might matter. Even the ending leaves us unsettled, Alfie standing on a bridge looking off into the distance.

recommended

Geez, been awhile since I watched a whole movie. Possibly Open Range (released in 2003) wasn’t the right choice to break my dry spell. Kevin Costner and Robert Duval are old school cattle drivers, taking advantage of legal permission to graze their herds on open spaces. Or open ranges, that’s probably part of where the title comes from. Trouble comes in the form of a rancher (Michael Gambon) who doesn’t care for the men or the competition.

Costner also directed, using a script by Craig Storper from Lauran Paine’s decades old novel The Open Range Men. As the film opens, Duval, Costner and two younger hands are settling in for the night with a thin tarp sheltering them from a torrential downpour; nothing much happens for the next 20 minutes or so except one of the younger hands, played by man-mountain Abraham Benrubi, heads back to the nearest town for some supplies. When he hasn’t returned a couple of days later the two older men find him in jail, nearly beaten to death.

This is just a warning from Gambon, an Irishman who controls the largest ranch as well as the sheriff and town–you can pretty much picture one of those thin mustache twirlers from the silent picture days and nail this character. Duval immediately understands that his boys better destroy Gambon or leave their herd behind and run away, there won’t be any middle ground.

But neither of them are willing to duck the fight. Costner’s Charley Waite was apparently the Civil War equivalent of a Special Forces soldier though as director he feels no need to specify in which army. Though that might have been 17 years in the past, the stress and skills have lingered–Costner almost seems to making a Vietnam allegory or perhaps a Sopranos western. If there’s a difference, the latter probably uses dark humor to emphasize the hollow core of its characters but Open Range is simply gritty and single-minded.

Is this a good film? Compared to other recent westerns like Eastwood’s Unforgiven or Costner’s own Dances with Wolves, I’d say no. While those two films twist a classic genre into modern psychological expeditions and emphasize the beauty of what we gave up for today’s conveniences, Open Range exploits those conventions and wastes many minutes of screen time in plodding conversations or extended shots of (admittedly) beautiful vistas. The last hour was actually decent and if someone had stepped in to put Costner right this could have been much better.

not recommended