(Wolf 2003: n.pag.)
Alfie, however, marked a turning point in Law’s choice of roles, trading unashamedly on his boyish good looks and capitalizing on press interest deriving from the break-up of his marriage, so that his public image went from stable family man to freewheeling Lothario overnight. This offered the possibility (similar to Caine) of a conflation between a womanizing man about town persona and his character in Alfie but Law, unlike Caine, distanced himself in interviews from the character he played.
Alfie is a guy who relies on the veneer. He thinks that it’s enough to buy a great cheap suit, say the right things and bed this woman and that woman and that will bring him happiness but he’s so wrong.
(Hiscock 2004b: n.pag)
In terms of Law’s performance, the direct address to the audience was retained and elaborated on in the 2004 Alfie, but operates differently to the Caine film. Whilst the former was delivered squarely to camera, in the latter Law’s Alfie seeks a more ironic, self-deprecating complicity. Whilst Caine switches from talking to the audience to going back into the scene, with Law there is more ongoing communication with the audience within the scene. He winks, shrugs, scowls and smiles at the camera, whilst simultaneously engaging with the female characters. Therefore whilst Caine’s performance suggested that Alfie’s admissions to camera are self-deluding performances, Law’s performance implies that his Alfie is much more knowing about his behaviour to women, asking the audience to understand and forgive his transgressions. Caine’s verdict on Law’s interpretation demonstrates this:
My Alfie didn’t know what he was doing in that film – but thought that he did. Jude’s Alfie clearly knew what he was up to all along […] I played Alfie as a sort of primitive. The last line I say in that movie is, ‘What’s it all about?’ The minute Jude walks on you know that here is a guy who knows exactly what everything is about.
(Pearce 2007: 21)
Therefore Law’s metrosexual masculinity, despite being in Dyer’s terms a ‘perfect fit’ for a reconfigured post-feminist Alfie, ironically emphasizes the potential misogyny of the material as his knowingness regarding his actions towards women is signalled through his way of playing the direct address to the audience and seeking their complicity.
Both screen versions of Alfie added songs that emphasized their status as pop-cultural events, and in this next section, I will look at music as performance in stage–screen adaptations. The significance of music and sound for live performance has recently been explored by Roesner (2016) and Kendrick and Roesner (2012), counteracting a scholarly tendency to privilege the visual or the spectacle in analyses of theatrical productions. Roesner in particular has argued that attention paid to musicalization in the theatre ‘re-introduces a full range of textual potential: as rhythmical, gesticulatory, melodic, spatial and sounding phenomenon as well as a carrier of meaning’ (2016: 3). This section will focus in particular on how music operates on stage in relation to the spoken and aural elements of the performance text, predominantly using the example of the original production of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, a work that was notable for its conscious deployment of musical elements to support the development of character and themes. I will then look at the film adaptation to track how the relationships between music and visual elements were carried over or reconfigured.
Raymond Spottiswoode described film music as having the following functions: imitation – where score imitates speech or natural sounds; commentary – where the score takes the role of commentator to the images on screen; evocation – where music reveals something about character (this includes the ‘leitmotif’ where a tune becomes associated with a character through repetition); contrast – where music contrasts with the image to create effect; and finally dynamism – where music works together with the composition to emphasize editing or cutting (1965: 49–50). Narrative conventions such as Classical Hollywood Narrative style developed after synchronous sound was introduced meant that the relationship of image and sound was determined by certain ideological practices, which used the soundtrack to support the image and render itself invisible in the process. Music for plays rarely functions as underscore in this way, although it does sometimes echo the same practices of providing musical leitmotifs for certain characters, or using well-known songs to heighten the emotional affect. For instance, Lyn Gardner recalls the use of Otis Redding’s ‘Try a Little Tenderness’ at the end of a production of Jim Cartwright’s 1980s classic about the effect of Thatcher’s policies on a community, Road. The use of the song implicitly demands audience empathy for the plight of the protagonists:
Redding’s anthem suddenly soars over the deafening daily roar of despair and hopelessness of a group of young people living in a dead-end Northern town that has had the community ripped out of it by unemployment. In both cases, without the cunning use of the song, the emotional impact of each scene would be diminished.
(Gardner 2008: n.pag.)
Music has become part of the toolkit with which productions can impact their audiences today, although in the past it was more typical for music to be absent from a stage production and then introduced to underpin classical narrative conventions in the screen adaptation. For instance, in Joe Orton’s Entertaining Mr Sloane (1966) no music is indicated in the written text of the original stage production. The film adaptation, made in 1970, in a strategy typical of the period, has a pop theme tune with the same title, written and sung by Georgie Fame, placed over the opening credits and revisited throughout the film. However, the film also uses music to signal that the action is to be understood as a farce, a generic signifier that the play scrupulously avoids. Campbell has examined the use of music and sound in the marriage scene between Sloane (Peter McEnery), Kath (Beryl Reid) and Ed (Harry Andrews). As the characters promise, ‘I will’, the music suddenly stops and there is ‘a plucked bass portamento, which produces a decidedly comic effect’ (Campbell 2013: 152). Both Ed and Kath then kiss Sloane, and the soundtrack returns to Fame’s theme tune and then to a church organ finish as ‘Amen’ is written across the final image of the threesome together. Campbell argues that the sound explicitly positions the gay marriage as farcical, a parody of Christian marriage and thus encourages the audience to not take it too seriously, unlike the play where the final ménage à trois between Kath, Ed and Sloane is presented without commentary (Orton 2014: 129). The music therefore dates the film in a way that the play remains timeless and because of the legalization of same-sex marriage in the United Kingdom in 2014, ‘the use of audio effects to distance the audience from considering gay marriage as a potential reality now seems quaint’ (Campbell 2013: 167).
There are also examples where music is used in the original production of the play but takes on a different significance in the film. Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus was first performed at the National Theatre in 1979 and subsequently adapted into a film in 1984 by Shaffer himself and directed by Milos Forman. Both play and film depict the rivalry between court composer Antonio Salieri and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, with the former tortured by the realization of his own mediocrity in the presence of Mozart’s feckless genius. The original play was in two acts and divided into twelve and seven scenes, with the music in the play presented as if it was heard from the perspective of Salieri’s paranoid mind. For instance, rather than use sections of Mozart’s actual music, the composer for the stage play, Harrison Birtwistle aurally distorted patches of Mozart’s music so they were almost unrecognizable (Tibbetts 2004: 168).
The film on the other hand both exploited the prestige factor of recognizably ‘classical’ music in the soundtrack and arranged it in line with the conventions of the Hollywood biopic genre. Sequences of Mozart’s actual music were used, recorded by the Academy of St Martin in the Fields and conducted by Sir Neville Marriner specifically for the film. Commentators have noted how the release of the film led to a renaissance in Mozart’s popularity, with the CD of the film’s soundtrack becoming one of the year’s bestsellers. However, specific pieces of Mozart’s music were also selected to highlight the narrative’s thematic concerns. Most notable in these terms was the sequence depicting Mozart’s death, where Salieri notates his rival’s Requiem, as the