The most noticeable difference is that the directors are hardly New Wave “auteurs.” Lewis Gilbert, who never again made a film as lively and moving as Alfie, had a long, impersonal career of studio trustworthiness, including three James Bonds (You Only Live Twice, The Spy Who Loved Me, and Moonraker) and two softhearted artsy hits (Shirley Valentine and Educating Rita). Georgy Girl’s Silvio Narizzano? A cinéaste for hire: The Body in the Library, Loot, and Die! Die! My Darling!

Yet let’s give credit. These filmmakers created a bridge from the New Wave’s London stories to what the world out there would want to see. Tom Jones won Best Picture in 1963, and Alfie and Georgy Girl followed joyously after. Not only were they box-office smashes in the US, but Alfie was nominated for five Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Actor. Georgy Girl had four nominations, including Best Actress and Best Supporting Actor. And there are those beloved songs: “Hey, there, Georgy Girl! . . . ” “What’s it all about, Alfie?”

Alfie is all about Michael Caine’s tremendous performance, from the days when he was thin and curly blond and commanded the frame in the surly, streetwise way of a Brit Clint Eastwood. In re-creating Bill Naughton’s stage-play hero, Caine transported to cinema a fully realized cockney character, and one equipped (Naughton’s dandy screenplay) with a Bartlett’s book of cockney one-liners, especially about Alfie’s many women. Like “I don’t want no bird’s respect. I wouldn’t know what to do with it.” And “My understanding of women only goes to the pleasure. As for the pain, I’m like every other bloke. I don’t want to know.”

On stage, Alfie stepped forward and chatted with the audience. A brilliant decision was to keep the asides going in the movie, so Alfie holds forth to the camera eye, blurting out secrets he would never reveal in a lifetime, especially to a bird. Much of the conversation is about his obsessive female conquests: how he gets them, how he juggles them, how, when the inevitable moment comes, he gets rid of them. About all this he’s sensationally clever, and ladies keep falling his way.

Among his chicks: a young married woman (Millicent Martin) who tells her hubby she’s at the movies; a sweet young thing (Julia Foster) whom he abandons even though she’s given birth to his child; a serious married lady (Vivien Merchant) for whom he must call in an illegal abortionist after getting her pregnant; a middle-aged playgirl (Shelley Winters) who actually one-ups him for promiscuity.

We watch Alfie with a split consciousness, beguiled by his charm and energy and by his Casanova talents (and we’re his confidants) but also put off by how often he leaves women feeling numb and terrible. Maybe that’s what’s so good: old Lewis Gilbert has gone positively Brechtian, inviting us make up our own minds about Alfie’s callous morality, as if, Brecht would say, we were on a trial jury.

Georgy Girl doesn’t have that same courage, so there are scenes that beg us to fall in love with Lynn Redgrave’s chubby, goofy heroine, who’s 22 and never been smooched. As she’s been told, “The truth is, you just missed being beautiful.” But she’s definitely lovely in spirit and soul, as we see as she prances around with children. They all adore her; they (and we, arm-twisted) feel how she’s special. Meanwhile, every cad in London prefers instead her fashionable, superficial, beautiful-on-the-outside roommate, Meredith (Charlotte Rampling).

Put me with the bad guys: Georgy as overplayed by a mugging Redgrave can be a drag and a downer, but Rampling makes a super bitch, and Alan Bates is superb as her leather-capped, bubbly boyfriend.

I thought I was the lonely one who considers the well-reviewed Thirteen Days a vanity production in which showoff Kevin Costner as special assistant Kenneth O’Donnell gets to inform the muddled Kennedys about the Cuban crisis, tell off Jackie and Adlai Stevenson, etc. Poppycock! My complaint is seconded by columnist Eric Alterman in the January 29 issue of the Nation, where he asks why Costner’s O’Donnell has been put at the center of the action — and offers an explanation. “O’Donnell, who was responsible primarily for presidential scheduling in real life, does not even register in respected crisis histories. . . . Cynics looking for an explanation of this rather odd historic rewrite might point to the fact the film was partially funded by O’Donnell’s son, Earthlink co-founder Kevin O'Donnell.”

The Brattle Theatre’s sublime British New Wave series has demonstrated how quickly the movement came and imploded, its most expressive screw-the-bloody-class-system period squeezed into the years 1959-1965. That’s when Tony Richardson, Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz, and Richard Lester forged their indelible masterpieces, from Look Back in Anger (1959) and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) through This Sporting Life (1963) and Help! (1965). Alfie (1966) and Georgy Girl (1966), an appealing double bill at the Brattle this Monday, seem postscripts from a less visionary time.

The most noticeable difference is that the directors are hardly New Wave “auteurs.” Lewis Gilbert, who never again made a film as lively and moving as Alfie, had a long, impersonal career of studio trustworthiness, including three James Bonds (You Only Live Twice, The Spy Who Loved Me, and Moonraker) and two softhearted artsy hits (Shirley Valentine and Educating Rita). Georgy Girl’s Silvio Narizzano? A cinéaste for hire: The Body in the Library, Loot, and Die! Die! My Darling!

Yet let’s give credit. These filmmakers created a bridge from the New Wave’s London stories to what the world out there would want to see. Tom Jones won Best Picture in 1963, and Alfie and Georgy Girl followed joyously after. Not only were they box-office smashes in the US, but Alfie was nominated for five Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Actor. Georgy Girl had four nominations, including Best Actress and Best Supporting Actor. And there are those beloved songs: “Hey, there, Georgy Girl! . . . ” “What’s it all about, Alfie?”

Alfie is all about Michael Caine’s tremendous performance, from the days when he was thin and curly blond and commanded the frame in the surly, streetwise way of a Brit Clint Eastwood. In re-creating Bill Naughton’s stage-play hero, Caine transported to cinema a fully realized cockney character, and one equipped (Naughton’s dandy screenplay) with a Bartlett’s book of cockney one-liners, especially about Alfie’s many women. Like “I don’t want no bird’s respect. I wouldn’t know what to do with it.” And “My understanding of women only goes to the pleasure. As for the pain, I’m like every other bloke. I don’t want to know.”

On stage, Alfie stepped forward and chatted with the audience. A brilliant decision was to keep the asides going in the movie, so Alfie holds forth to the camera eye, blurting out secrets he would never reveal in a lifetime, especially to a bird. Much of the conversation is about his obsessive female conquests: how he gets them, how he juggles them, how, when the inevitable moment comes, he gets rid of them. About all this he’s sensationally clever, and ladies keep falling his way.

Among his chicks: a young married woman (Millicent Martin) who tells her hubby she’s at the movies; a sweet young thing (Julia Foster) whom he abandons even though she’s given birth to his child; a serious married lady (Vivien Merchant) for whom he must call in an illegal abortionist after getting her pregnant; a middle-aged playgirl (Shelley Winters) who actually one-ups him for promiscuity.

We watch Alfie with a split consciousness, beguiled by his charm and energy and by his Casanova talents (and we’re his confidants) but also put off by how often he leaves women feeling numb and terrible. Maybe that’s what’s so good: old Lewis Gilbert has gone positively Brechtian, inviting us make up our own minds about Alfie’s callous morality, as if, Brecht would say, we were on a trial jury.

Georgy Girl doesn’t have that same courage, so there are scenes that beg us to fall in love with Lynn Redgrave’s chubby, goofy heroine, who’s 22 and never been smooched. As she’s been told, “The truth is, you just missed being beautiful.” But she’s definitely lovely in spirit and soul, as we see as she prances around with children. They all adore her; they (and we, arm-twisted) feel how she’s special. Meanwhile, every cad in London prefers instead her fashionable, superficial, beautiful-on-the-outside roommate, Meredith (Charlotte Rampling).

Put me with the bad guys: Georgy as overplayed by a mugging Redgrave can be a drag and a downer, but Rampling makes a super bitch, and Alan Bates is superb as her leather-capped, bubbly boyfriend.

I thought I was the lonely one who considers the well-reviewed Thirteen Days a vanity production in which showoff Kevin Costner as special assistant Kenneth O’Donnell gets to inform the muddled Kennedys about the Cuban crisis, tell off Jackie and Adlai Stevenson, etc. Poppycock! My complaint is seconded by columnist Eric Alterman in the January 29 issue of the Nation, where he asks why Costner’s O’Donnell has been put at the center of the action — and offers an explanation. “O’Donnell, who was responsible primarily for presidential scheduling in real life, does not even register in respected crisis histories. . . . Cynics looking for an explanation of this rather odd historic rewrite might point to the fact the film was partially funded by O’Donnell’s son, Earthlink co-founder Kevin O'Donnell.”