What's it all about - again?

Everyone who saw Alfie at the time of its release remembers the film's seismic impact on not just the British film industry, but on Britain, too. I'm referring, of course, to the 1966 original with Michael Caine, not the sweeter, lighter remake with Jude Law, out this week. Before Alfie, sex in British cinema was synonymous with well-bred Dirk Bogarde in Doctor At Sea - one foot on the floor during love scenes and fluent in innuendo.

Caine as Alfie was something else again - a Cockney cad, a Jack the lad, a working class anti-hero with a line in brazen chat guaranteed to lure as many 'birds' into bed as possible, and daring to refer to women as 'it' in the process. Not even Jimmy Porter in Look Back In Anger, and the Northern working-class men who inhabited earlier Sixties movies such as Saturday Night And Sunday Morning and Billy Liar had gone quite that far.

And Caine made the audience part of the game. Alfie addressed the camera directly as he went about seducing brassy Millicent Martin, mousy Jane Asher, vulgar Shelley Winters and bitter Vivien Merchant.

That's what the 'squares' found so shocking at the Leicester Square premiere - the picture of London just beginning to swing, with the Pill, Women's Liberation and peace, love and drugs lurking just over the horizon. But what probably shocked the swingers in the crowd - The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, supermodel Jean Shrimpton and footballer George Best all left the cinema visibly aghast - was how brutally the film depicted the consequences of Sixties 'liberation'.

Alfie starts as a lark and ends up with Caine weeping at the sight of Merchant's aborted fetus in a wastepaper basket. The comedy turns out to be a morality tale. And, in the end, the tables are turned. Alfie, who has been so callous to women, is dumped by Winters for a younger stud. To her, he's just been easy flesh all along. Small wonder the censor had to think long and hard before passing the film uncut.

Today it's impossible to think of anyone else as Alfie except Michael Caine. Certainly not Caine's former roommate Terence Stamp, who played the part - not very successfully - on Broadway. The role required East End, not West End, Cockney, not Mockney. Which is why Alfie's director, Lewis Gilbert, fought tooth and nail for Caine when Paramount, which financed the film, said 'Michael who?'

Even when the film was made, Paramount wanted to dub the Cockney for its American release.

But the Cockney was important. It was the first time a working-class London lad, actually playing a workingclass London lad, had the lead in a British film, and it made Caine a world star. Now, of course, we have to think of someone other than Caine as Alfie. Jude Law approached the part with considerable trepidation - after all, the posters for the original proclaimed, 'Michael Caine is Alfie'.

And he was quite right to approach Caine, who gave him a simple and effective piece of advice: 'Find a friend in the lens.' Which Law does. He talks to the camera, and thus to us, with Caine's same lack of embarrassment (and shame).

Law says that he was never a great fan of remakes, but that the new Alfie is different, since it investigates how much of the sexual terrain has changed and how much of it remains the same. He adds that they remake Hamlet and Macbeth, don't they?

They do. But they don't usually change Hamlet's dialogue or relocate Macbeth to the Big Apple. If there's more than a tinge of Sex And The City to the latest film, it's not just because Alfie himself is different, it's because the women are different, too. The sex wars the original saw coming - as Winters discards Caine - have been fought and in 2004 it looks increasingly like the girls are the winners. Alfie's new 'harem' - Sienna Miller (Law's reallife partner), Susan Sarandon, Marisa Tomei and Nia Long - are made of sterner stuff.