Adapting Performance Between Stage and Screen. Victoria Lowe
was a transatlantic box office success, being the second highest grossing film at the UK box office after Thunderball and making $10 million in the United States. However, the film didn’t meet universal critical acclaim, with several reviewers noticing the difference between the original play and the screen adaptation.
Bill Naughton’s funny, touching and sad little character study has suffered the ultimate metamorphosis. Drenched in garish Technicolour, stretched into Techniscope and fitted with a pop theme tune, it has made Alfie a modish anti-hero inside whose thick skin the original play can occasionally be heard struggling to get out.
(Anon. 1966: n.pag.)
This review points to a tension between a character whose actions the narrative demands we should question and the star who we are asked to admire for his free-wheeling brazen sexual confidence. There is therefore a certain distance between the star who remains visually and sexually powerful and the character who is subjected to the effects of the narrative that demand he should pay some sort of penalty for his sexual and social transgressions. This tension is compounded by the retention of the play’s direct address to the audience, so that Caine as Alfie is the on-screen narrator of his own story, inviting the audience’s collusion with his view of events, whilst the other characters remain oblivious to Alfie’s on-camera discourse. This direct audience address and Caine’s throwaway ironic delivery of it render Alfie, as Jeffery Richards concluded, more of a ‘role model than an object of condemnation’ (1997: 163).
Yet whilst an examination of Caine’s star persona would support this view, there are moments in the film when Caine’s performance does show Alfie to be more sensitive than his brash exterior would suggest. Although events are shown without the audience gaining any access to the women’s point of view, as the film progresses, it deliberately opens up a space between what Alfie says about his actions to the audience and what the film shows us of their effect. Caine’s performance underpins this, particularly in the scene, when he returns to the flat, where Lily (Vivien Merchant) has had to go through a painful abortion after Alfie has got her pregnant. After entering the room he ignores Lily’s tired plea not to enter into the side room, where the aborted foetus has been discarded. From his entrance into the room, Alfie’s face is framed in close up and Caine shows him looking nervously around and then slowly approach the foetus. The camera stays on Alfie’s face, without cutting away. Caine looks down and then up, with his face contorted by an expression of extreme anguish and tears come to his eyes as he realizes the implications of his actions. The fact that this is all shot in close up accentuates identification with the character at this moment and seems to give the audience privileged access to Alfie’s inner anguish, albeit arguably more for himself than for his partner.1 In the following scene, Alfie confides in his friend (Murray Melvin) about his attitude to the event rather than the audience, indicating that the direct address to camera presenting a confident lothario is more of a performance and Alfie’s masculinity is therefore more fragile than it appears. Therefore as Carson concludes:
For all their representations of a male centred style centred exaltation of the classless consumerist self these films do not present the spectator with a uniform celebration of a male centred perspective.
(Carson 1998: 58)
The equivalent scene in the play puts Alfie in a much more unsympathetic light. It is constructed differently as we see Alfie with Lily after the abortion before Alfie leaves her to get some air and then narrates directly to the audience how he went back to the flat and accidentally sees the aborted foetus. The fact that he tells the audience that he cried, and not for anyone else but ‘’is bleedin self’, encourages the audience to take a more critical view of him and his actions (Naughton 1963: 60). Furthermore, in both the scenes with Lily he appears incapable of realizing the full implications of what has happened. He slaps her to stop her from screaming in case the landlady hears and the illegal act is found out. At the end of the scene he thoughtlessly tosses her a toy teddy bear for her youngest son, although goes silent when he sees her holding it like a baby. The ending of the play, when he looks back over his ‘little life’, shows him in a more pensive mood, but this is undercut by him inadvertently bumping into Siddie, who he had unceremoniously dumped at the beginning of the play. He persuades her to go off with him and seems to have recovered his former swagger. This contrasts with the ending of the Caine film, which ends more ambiguously with Caine famously asking the audience, ‘What’s it all about?’
Changing the focus in adaptation to performance brings into view what the star brings to the character in terms of their persona, what the actor brings to character in terms of performance of the role and the interplay between the three elements. By looking at the actor as an agent in the adaptive process we can understand how texts can change quite fundamentally between stage and screen and in screen remakes. In the case of Alfie, the strong star persona constructed for Michael Caine at the beginning of his career comes into conflict with the morality of the original material. However, Caine’s performance and the way it is presented by the mise en scène could be said to point to this moral imperative by showing us a character hiding behind a public persona that is revealed by the end to be a construction.
Other actors then can affect the character as performed and it’s useful in this respect to compare Caine’s Alfie with the remake in 2004 and Jude Law in the title role as an ersatz post-feminist Alfie. Law’s star persona at this point was marked by a more fluid metrosexual masculinity than Caine’s and publicly Law identified himself with the film’s attitude to the main character rather than the character itself, which again subtly altered the ideological import of the drama. The remake was positioned as an updated adaptation of the film rather than the play, with Law claiming that
The only thing I didn’t want to do was a Michael Caine. It’s a rethink of Alfie […] you can’t remake it because it’s too much of a classic but we’ve taken the essence of Alfie Elkins and set him in a modern age with modern women which puts a completely different slant on how he behaves and what he can get away with.
(Hiscock 2004b: n.pag.)
The action was transposed from Swinging London to contemporary New York (although the film was actually shot in Manchester), with Alfie still working as a chauffeur but now zipping about the streets self-consciously on his blue vintage Vespa. The issues of class embedded in the play and still traceable in the Caine version are erased in multicultural, classless New York, as Law, the cheeky outsider, moves with ease between Marisa Tomei’s humble flat to Susan Sarandon’s penthouse suite. There is no abortion scene and male friendships in the film are given more prominence. Alfie’s affair with his friend’s girlfriend is therefore framed more in terms of the betrayal of homosocial bonds it represents. Although the film seems to draw on Sex and the City discourses of female empowerment, the film is still ambiguous in its portrayal of sexual relations. Arguably the introduction of Alfie’s impotence as a key narrative device early on in the film positions him as more sympathetic to audiences, so that his inability to commit is ultimately more damaging to himself than to the feisty women around him. This shift of emphasis in Law’s Alfie is evidenced by the reworking of the poster away from ‘Caine IS Alfie’ to the more plaintive (and referencing Cilla Black’s original theme tune), ‘What’s it all about?’, with Law gazing out soulfully to the audience, trapped within the I of Alfie, rather than in the 1966 poster, where Caine’s disembodied head sits cheekily on top of it.
Although his role in Alfie was supposed to launch Law as a transatlantic star in a very similar way to Michael Caine, there are significant differences in their star personas that mediate the effect of Alfie as a character. Whilst Caine appeared to embrace stardom and was happy to collude with the construction of his persona as Cockney man about town, Law seemed notably more reluctant to commit himself to the construction of a consistent star persona. Up until Alfie, Law was known for his stage as well as screen acting and, despite his leading man good looks, tended to take on character parts. Anthony Minghella, who directed Law in The Talented Mr Ripley (1999), described Law’s reluctance to take on roles beyond the dazzling character turn and embrace the fact that he could be seen as both an actor and a star.
It’s true of all