Alfie's London

The capital in the Swinging Sixties wasn't as lit up as we might imagine

This man doesn’t need to tell you what his name is - neither his real name, nor the name of the character he’s playing in the clip below. Enjoy his performance, filmed on Waterloo Bridge. Enjoy the way he says “a car”. And don’t miss the role played by London and the Thames.

The city looks, in the words of a friend, so dark and forbidding. It was 1966, England’s World Cup winning year, but only 25 years since the Blitz. “Swinging London” had been invented, but few parts of the capital were doing it. Much of the place was still blackened, traumatised and scarred.

You see more of that old London in the clip below, which picks up where the closing scene of Alfie above leaves off. It is also a reminder that in the film, Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s title song is sung jazz style by Cher. It is not the most famous version.

Alfie was though, one of Michael Caine’s most famous roles in the early part of his career, further defining him as a cockney anti-hero of his culturally disruptive times.

Many other members of the cast were illustrious, too. Romford-born Millicent Martin, now aged 92, was best known to many as a singer, though she was a successful actress too. Jane Asher, from Willesden, was still working as recently as 2023. Shirley Anne Field, born in Forest Gate, who died two years ago, would later play a prominent role in another classic London film, My Beautiful Laundrette. The career of Eleanor Bron, from Stanmore, has encompassed everything from a Beatles film to The Archers. Alfie Bass, a son of Bethnal Green, seems to have been in almost everything in the 1960s and 1970s.

There are some very good sites documenting other locations where Michael Caine’s Alfie, adapted by Bill Naughton from his 1963 play and produced and directed by Lewis Gilbert, was shot. See here, here, here and here. As for the best-known rendition of the song of the same name, there is some fabulous footage of it being recorded at Abbey Road studios by a young woman from Liverpool. Perhaps we’ll look at that some more another day.