Mayo playwright made movie history back in the 1960s
By Tom Gillespie
BALLYHAUNIS-BORN playwright Bill Naughton has the distinction of having his radio play Alfie, when adapted for the big screen, to be the first film to receive the ‘suggested for mature audiences’ classification by the Motion Picture Association of America in the US, which evolved into the modern PG rating.
The film, which starred Michael Caine, had its world premiere at the Plaza Theatre in the West End of London on March 24, 1966.
Based on a radio play, turned stage play, turned novel, it presents Alfie (played by Caine) as a streetwise, self-absorbed bloke who lives only to seduce and abandon as many women as possible.
Although the birth of his child with a one-time lover (Julia Foster) fails to inspire him to settle down, his carefree ways are tempered when a woman (Vivien Merchant), with whom he has had a casual fling, becomes pregnant and opts for an abortion.
The film ends on an ambivalent note as Alfie encounters and is hurt by a woman (Shelly Winters) just as promiscuous as himself. The film also starred Jane Asher and Julia Foster and took an estimated $800,000 at the box office.
Alfie became the definitive representation of the younger generation’s increasingly laid-back attitude toward sex in the 1960s.
The narrative technique of having Caine’s character address the audience directly was hailed as innovative, and Caine’s performance, in the wake of his acclaimed work in Zulu (1964), helped to establish him as a leading man.
Alfie (Caine) is a charming, roguish Cockney who cannot get his fill of women. He uses them without shame or malice, jumping from one promiscuous female's bed to another without much thought or feeling.
Of course, Alfie's not as carefree as he would have the audience - to whom he often speaks directly - think: he treats his pregnant common-law wife Gilda (Julia Foster) quite shabbily, and has an affair with a married woman (Vivien Merchant) that leaves her pregnant, for which Alfie arranges an abortion.
In the end, according to Wikipedia, Alfie never finds lasting meaning or pleasure but remains an unrepentant, if low-class, Don Juan.
The film went on to be nominated for five Oscars at the 39th Academy Awards ceremony, including best picture and actor.
With this film, Michael Caine moved into the select class of top international stars.
In 2004 an American remake of the film was released, with British actor Jude Law in the title role.
Primarily remembered as an English writer, Bill Naughton’s Catholic Irish upbringing formed an important part of his literary sensibility.
Naughton was born in Ballyhaunis, on June 12, 1910, to impoverished parents who emigrated to Bolton in 1914.
He left school at 14 to work in a local cotton mill and subsequently held a succession of labouring and driving jobs before moving to London in the early 1940s, where he was a wartime conscientious objector.
Having long struggled - in an almost classically working-class fashion - to get into print, Naughton had his first short story published in the London Evening News in 1943.
The success of his debut novel, the autobiographical A Roof Over Your Head (1945), gave him the confidence to write full-time, and throughout the 1950s he produced a steady stream of short stories for the magazine market.
But it was as a playwright that Naughton made his greatest impact, the trilogy All in Good Time (1963), Alfie (1963) and Spring and Port Wine (1964) establishing him as a shrewd chronicler of northern English working-class life.
Naughton continued to write plays and fiction following his move to the Isle of Man in 1968, but his best late work is contained in his autobiographical trilogy, On the Pig’s Back (1987), Saintly Billy (1988) and Neither Use Nor Ornament (1995), which is replete with vividly recalled incident and acutely observed social detail.
Naughton died on January 9, 1992, aged 81 years.