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 wonderful actors that they somehow are in a complex relationship with stardom, particularly British actors; they think they mistrust it, and they want the regard of their peers. They want to be perceived as actors.
(Wolf 2003: n.pag.)
Alfie, however, marked a turning point in Law’s choice of roles, trading unashamedly on his boyish good looks and capitalizing on press interest deriving from the break-up of his marriage, so that his public image went from stable family man to freewheeling Lothario overnight. This offered the possibility (similar to Caine) of a conflation between a womanizing man about town persona and his character in Alfie but Law, unlike Caine, distanced himself in interviews from the character he played.
Alfie is a guy who relies on the veneer. He thinks that it’s enough to buy a great cheap suit, say the right things and bed this woman and that woman and that will bring him happiness but he’s so wrong.
(Hiscock 2004b: n.pag)
In terms of Law’s performance, the direct address to the audience was retained and elaborated on in the 2004 Alfie, but operates differently to the Caine film. Whilst the former was delivered squarely to camera, in the latter Law’s Alfie seeks a more ironic, self-deprecating complicity. Whilst Caine switches from talking to the audience to going back into the scene, with Law there is more ongoing communication with the audience within the scene. He winks, shrugs, scowls and smiles at the camera, whilst simultaneously engaging with the female characters. Therefore whilst Caine’s performance suggested that Alfie’s admissions to camera are self-deluding performances, Law’s performance implies that his Alfie is much more knowing about his behaviour to women, asking the audience to understand and forgive his transgressions. Caine’s verdict on Law’s interpretation demonstrates this:
My Alfie didn’t know what he was doing in that film – but thought that he did. Jude’s Alfie clearly knew what he was up to all along […] I played Alfie as a sort of primitive. The last line I say in that movie is, ‘What’s it all about?’ The minute Jude walks on you know that here is a guy who knows exactly what everything is about.
(Pearce 2007: 21)
Therefore Law’s metrosexual masculinity, despite being in Dyer’s terms a ‘perfect fit’ for a reconfigured post-feminist Alfie, ironically emphasizes the potential misogyny of the material as his knowingness regarding his actions towards women is signalled through his way of playing the direct address to the audience and seeking their complicity.
Both screen versions of Alfie added songs that emphasized their status as pop-cultural events, and in this next section, I will look at music as performance in stage–screen adaptations. The significance of music and sound for live performance has recently been explored by Roesner (2016) and Kendrick and Roesner (2012), counteracting a scholarly tendency to privilege the visual or the spectacle in analyses of theatrical productions. Roesner in particular has argued that attention paid to musicalization in the theatre ‘re-introduces a full range of textual potential: as rhythmical, gesticulatory, melodic, spatial and sounding phenomenon as well as a carrier of meaning’ (2016: 3). This section will focus in particular on how music operates on stage in relation to the spoken and aural elements of the performance text, predominantly using the example of the original production of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, a work that was notable for its conscious deployment of musical elements to support the development of character and themes. I will then look at the film adaptation to track how the relationships between music and visual elements were carried over or reconfigured.
Raymond Spottiswoode described film music as having the following functions: imitation – where score imitates speech or natural sounds; commentary – where the score takes the role of commentator to the images on screen; evocation – where music reveals something about character (this includes the ‘leitmotif’ where a tune becomes associated with a character through repetition); contrast – where music contrasts with the image to create effect; and finally dynamism – where music works together with the composition to emphasize editing or cutting (1965: 49–50). Narrative conventions such as Classical Hollywood Narrative style developed after synchronous sound was introduced meant that the relationship of image and sound was determined by certain ideological practices, which used the soundtrack to support the image and render itself invisible in the process. Music for plays rarely functions as underscore in this way, although it does sometimes echo the same practices of providing musical leitmotifs for certain characters, or using well-known songs to heighten the emotional affect. For instance, Lyn Gardner recalls the use of Otis Redding’s ‘Try a Little Tenderness’ at the end of a production of Jim Cartwright’s 1980s classic about the effect of Thatcher’s policies on a community, Road. The use of the song implicitly demands audience empathy for the plight of the protagonists:
Redding’s anthem suddenly soars over the deafening daily roar of despair and hopelessness of a group of young people living in a dead-end Northern town that has had the community ripped out of it by unemployment. In both cases, without the cunning use of the song, the emotional impact of each scene would be diminished.
(Gardner 2008: n.pag.)
