Hi. I haven't really thought this through, it just came to me suddenly while watching the original Alfie today. Maybe the old Alfie is more successful than the new one because of the obvious class differences (of women to Alfie, of women to the other women) it portrays? And the new one is less successful at making us believe these differences exist and matter? Thoughts?
shareAgreed. Simply put the old Alfie did a better job at directly engaging several highly controversial issues such as class and gender divides. It was also not afraid to make its main character an absolute ass (referring to girls as "it" for example) and showing things that would have been shocking for audiences of the time (abortions and extra-marital affairs, still retaining some shock power today).
However, I don't dislike the new Alfie because I don't think many of the elements that made it such a classic could exist in a modern film. You couldn't have a modern lead character who goes around calling girls "it", people just wouldn't buy it so they had to trade in Caine's dyed-in-the-wool misogynist for Jude Law's devil-may-care Alfie: not overtly misogynistic but so in love with himself and caught up in his various different relationships that he neglects people and, as his friend puts it, ends up hurting them (though not intentionally). I think it's a necessary change and Law's Alfie fits the modern day much better than a carbon copy of Caine would do but it's also the reason that the new film is really just lightweight entertainment whilst the original is seminal.