I watched the classic Michael Caine flick "Alfie" last night with my wife, both of us for the first time, and we were blown away. The issue of abortion was front and center - but not in a way one would expect - certainly not in a film released in 1966, right at the cusp of the sexual revolution.

Arguably, the film is not so much purely anti-abortion, as against what Caine here terms "back street abortions," and he's certainly got a legitimate point, as many familiar with pre-early 70s abortions will understand. Still, how much morally neater is a modern, vacuum-tubed procedure performed in a clinic? Perhaps this question is "Alfie's" ultimate legacy, as his character's torment strongly suggests.

The film starts out as a seemingly innocent portrayal of Swinging London. Caine is the archetypal Cockney-inflected ladies man; lovin' em and leavin 'em in rapid succession, and even offering hard-to-stomach ornithological aisdes about "it,' namely the various species of "birds" from whom he has learned to extract pleasure while zealously eschewing commitment.

But things change when one of his rotating harem, a seemingly plain girl whom - in one of his many direct-to-camera asides - he has already told viewers is a fallback-only date, becomes pregant with his child. He urges she abort the child, but she does not, and revealingly, he ends quite enamored of his smart, winning blond son. But yet Alfie won't commit, and runs out in the end, to be supplanted by a humdrum rival suitor who's been long waiting in the wings. Later, he sees the mother of his child in a church with her husband at the christening of their newly born daughter, the successor lovingly frolicking outdoors with Alfie's son, as his own. Caine's Alfie is crushed, but of course - it was all his choice.

Caine's Lothario soldiers on, and in a sanitorium for treatment of a lung ailment meets the plain wife of a drudge-y roommate, and mother of several of the man's children. Upon Alfie's release he seduces her at the first opportunity, and she too becomes pregnant. The subsequent scene in Alfie's modest London flat, involving the guilt-wracked woman and an abortionist, is the film's shocking climax. After compelling the woman to state that she has carefully considered alternatives, and that current law makes any abortion after one month a crime, the doctor nonetheless allows himself to be persuaded to provide service. He induces the abortion, but purposefully leaves before it occurs.

Alfie leaves too, and later returns to find the deed done, and the baby's premature corpse in a sideroom. The woman tells him not to look, but he can't help himself. He bemoans its perfectly develped form and his responsibilty for this "murder," as he terms it. This clearly seems not a quibble with the venue for the abortion, nor with existing law, but with the decision itself.

1966, mind you. Pretty heavy.

Still playing about, Alfie gets his final come-uppance when he barges in on an older lover of his, played by Shelley Winters, and finds her with a rock musician boy-toy.

In the end, Alfie finally begins to understand that it's not all about him; that permanent relationships are paramount; that you have to give at least as much as you take, and that abortion has a real human cost. All in all, quite a dose of moral values, for the time.

Abortion was a prominent dramatic theme before and after Alfie.

I understand there was an ultimately trifling 2004 re-make of Alfie, starring Jude Law. Remakes are inevitable these days, as the film industry seems to be running on empty.

As I've made clear here before, I am pro-choice but not pro-abortion. Though I certainly support parental notification laws and believe abortion is a momentous decision fraught with pain, and arguably, tragedy, I also believe that in the end, it is none of government's business to tell a grown woman what to do with her body, and arch-conservatives pushing for the blanket outlawing of abortion in the U.S. do so at great risk to the Republican Party's future viability.

That said, abortion is a choice to be avoided if at all possible, and there are many ways to do so. Additionally, "pro-choice" puppets such as NARAL, Planned Parenthood and millions of programmed, morally-relativistic "progressives" are all far too dismissive of the great human costs of abortion, a cost that is dramatically illustrated in "Alfie."

Alfie's message is already carved in stone: life, family, and commitment, above all.

TECHNORATI TAGS: ALFIE, JUDE LAW, MICHAEL CAINE, ABORTION, FILMS, PRO-CHOICE, PRO-LIFE

Posted by Matt Rosenberg at March 21, 2006 10:26 PM

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