Visible In Alfie And Darling example essay topic

Messages and Values portrayed in 1960's British cinema The Swinging 60's was the name given to the period in the 1960's where there was a phenomenal rise in youth culture, fuelled by pop music, fashion and a sexual revolution. Swinging London was portrayed in several films during this period, notably Alfie, Darling and A Hard Day's Night. The main theme of Alfie and Darling is the increase of sexual relationships in the younger generations. This is due to the creation of contraceptive pills and an increase in the availability of condoms. This allowed people to sleep around with a lowered risk of getting pregnant, and so people began to think of sex as more of a pastime because it was fun and could be done all the time. This portrayal of sex as a pastime is clearly visible in Alfie and Darling.

Diana Scott has nothing to offer the world, except her good looks and easy going character. This allows men like Laurence Harvey's character Miles to walk all over her. She has of course fallen in love with him, making it even easier for him to get his own way with her. All he wants her for is sex, and he gets it. Her husband, on the other hand, is a completely different character. Dirk Bogarde's Robert loves Diana.

He leaves his wife and children for her, but she ends up using him, breaking his heart. Towards the end of the film, when she returns briefly from Italy, he repays the favour, and uses her for sex. She is deeply offended by this, unable to see that she has been doing it all her adult life and therefore can't see that she deserves nothing more from Robert. Alfie sleeps around also. At the start of the film, he is sleeping with a married woman in his car. He sees nothing wrong with this, because as he says he has never met the husband, and therefore he doesn't think about him and doesn't feel that he is hurting him.

But his tune changes later in the film when he has sex with his friend's wife whilst driving her home. He even gets her pregnant. We see both sides of adultery. With Alfie we see a man having sex with a married woman, whilst Diana is a married woman who we see sleeping with other men. At the time nothing seems to be wrong with either situation, because we see things from their points of view and they see nothing wrong with what they are doing, until they get hurt later on in their respective stories. Another aspect of the Swinging 60's that was portrayed in British cinema was the rise in "celebrity culture", where normal working class people idolized famous people.

This is most obvious in the film A Hard Day's Night. This film follows The Beatles as they travel through London to get to a television studio where they are to be filmed. A mob of crazy fans chase them through a train station early on in the film, and later when they get off the train there's hundreds more fans waiting for them. This was really the first time that people went crazy over celebrities. The Beatles were a phenomenon unlike anything ever seen before them. They were followed everywhere they went, and this film shows this.

In Darling, Diana is a model, but she isn't as famous as the Beatles. In fact, she gets very little recognition as she walks through the streets of London. But she does get recognised at a few places she visits, like an art exhibition. She also gets asked to present a raffle at a charity event.

She does get a huge picture of her face put on a billboard. The pasting of this image to the billboard occurs in the very opening scene with credits appearing on screen around it. But the significance of this portrait of Diana is the fact that she is pasted over an image of African children starving. This shows that people began to think of celebrities as more important than this global problem. It also shows the shallowness of youths and younger generations, a shallowness still apparent in modern day England.

Rebelliousness was on the rise in the 1960's. Alfie shows this to us. In a scene where he is at work, he extracts some petrol from his boss's car, presumably to add to his own. He also tells the mother of his child that she should take some money out of the till that she works at. He says that everyone else does it, and therefore she should do it.

This kind of attitude was rarely seen before the sixties, but as people felt more free, they acted more freely, increasingly breaking laws. Another law broken in Alfie is the abortion laws. After Alfie gets his friend's wife pregnant, she has an abortion in his flat. A back street abortionist does the job illegally, and Alfie doesn't feel anything until afterwards, when he sees the aborted foetus in his kitchen and he has to dispose of it himself. Fashion was huge in the 60's. For the first time people were dressing fashionably in the working classes.

In Alfie we see this. He wears nice shirts and suits all the time. When he is having sex in his car, he covers his shoulder with a napkin so that it doesn't get covered in the woman's makeup. At another stage in the film, Gilda is crying and wants to hug Alfie, but he pushes her away so that she doesn't cry all over his precious shirt. Later on he has Annie brushing his jacket down so that there is no hair or dirt on his shoulders while he is walking around.

Diana in Darling was obviously a fashionable woman. She wore mini skirts and short dresses that were presumably bright and colourful. The people she socialise d with were also fashionable people, wearing smart suits. The fashion in A Hard Day's Night was fairly similar, with the Beatles wearing smart suits.