Adapting Performance Between Stage and Screen. Victoria Lowe

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СКАЧАТЬ accent to appeal to American audiences, Geoffrey Macnab claimed that Caine had to re-loop his dialogue to make his speaking clearer for the American market (Macnab 2000: 205). Caine was brought in to play the part after it had been originally offered to Stamp, who was his former flatmate. Stamp declined it after his failure in the role on Broadway and Caine recalls in his autobiography that he spent many hours remonstrating with Stamp to do the film role, to no avail (1993: 180). Caine himself at this point had actually failed an audition to replace John Neville in the stage version and was under contract to Harry Saltzman at the time after a minor but significant role in Zulu in 1964 and his starring role as the anti-Bond Harry Palmer in The Ipcress File in 1965. With the resources from the Bond films at his disposal, Saltzman was intent on making Caine a star and Alfie was the vehicle by which this was to be achieved, supported by an increase in the circulation of stories about Caine’s wild off-screen life and iconic photos of Caine in sharp suits and trademark glasses. Christine Gledhill has suggested that ‘stardom proper arises when the off-stage or off-screen life of the actor becomes as important as the performed role in the production of a semi-autonomous persona or image, a development which depends on mass circulation journalism or photography’ (1991: 192). This is evidenced by the extratextual information circulating around Caine at the time. The film’s original poster demonstrates an elision of character and star with the strapline, ‘Caine IS Alfie’. In his biography, Caine claims that at this time he was fully aware of building his public image and giving newspaper editors something to write about, so he made sure that all the interviews ‘were about birds’ leading to a swathe of articles in the popular press with titles such as ‘The bird man of Grosvenor Square’ (Caine 1993: 187). Therefore the original character of Alfie, whose character deficiencies are gradually revealed to the audience, becomes invested with the qualities of Caine’s star persona. This has implications for the overall drama as Alfie’s intensive womanizing is reworked to seem admirable for audiences rather than misogynistic or self-destructive. For American audiences, in particular, Caine was also being sold as the living embodiment of the social changes brought about by the mid-1960s consumer and post-war baby boom and became emblematic of the apparent breakdown in class divisions exemplified by Swinging London. An article in American Esquire that was intended to launch Caine as a star in the United States claimed that his working-class London roots made him a new kind of British star:

      No one exemplifies this transformation better than Caine […] he established his reputation not only as an actor but as an emblem of the new Britain and currently he is the most fashionable example of the crumbling of old class prejudice.

      (Lawrenson 1966: 32)

      Alfie 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 СКАЧАТЬ