Most critics take to Alfie, and nearly all of them take to Michael Caine. The praise clusters on his performance as the Cockney womaniser who talks straight to the camera: breezy and insolent, low-key, charming in a way several reviewers find troubling rather than winning. Lewis Gilbert’s direction is called sure-handed, and the film is read as a moral fable with more shadow in it than its reputation for sixties fizz suggests. The abortion scene is singled out again and again as the moment that still shocks, and Julia Foster and Vivien Merchant get a share of the notices.
The spread is narrow apart from one loud dissent. The New Yorker finds the jokes tired, the irreverence old-hat and Caine’s Cockney implausible, though it allows a couple of funny scenes and welcomes the turn to harsher material. Later writers see the film as a landmark of the British New Wave; the earliest ones merely find it amusing and moving.