It was his next role, as Cockney cad "Alfie" (a role that Caine had tried for and lost in the stage version), that would not only make him a star but give a hint of the fearlessness that would make him a rarity among movie stars. The part had already been turned down by other British actors, who knew that playing a bastard who uses women guiltlessly wouldn't win them audiences' sympathy. When Alfie Elkins loses interest in a bird, he knows she can still be handy to keep around for laundry and meals, and no matter how badly he treats women, to Alfie, it's never his fault. Caine's inspiration was to say the hell with sympathy. Narrating much of the story directly to the camera in a thick cockney accent, Alfie puts all of his charm at the purpose of his self-justification, trying to make all of us in the audience his marks. It's not a great movie. The director, Lewis Gilbert, can't resist the material's "sensitive" touches, like Alfie's guilt over his son being raised by another man. But he never shortchanges the hurt of the women, particularly Vivien Merchant, who's quietly spectacular as the plain housewife for whom Alfie has to arrange an abortion. The triumph of the movie is contained in that sequence, in Gilbert's dead-on handling of the seedy atmosphere, and in Caine's awareness of Alfie's blissful ignorance that this coldhearted stud is only a few years away from going to seed himself.

The key to Caine's performance as Alfie, in a way the key to all his acting, is the lightness of his approach. In his autobiography Caine tells a story about Jack Lemmon making his movie debut for George Cukor, who, after every take, kept telling the actor, "Do less." Finally, Lemmon said, "If I do any less, I'll be doing nothing," to which Cukor replied, "Now, you're getting it." Caine has learned that subtlety as only a handful of great film actors ever have.

There's another kind of subtlety at work in the 1986 British thriller "The Whistle Blower," one of the spate of movies made in disgusted reaction to the contempt for simple human decency that characterized every aspect of Margaret Thatcher's rule. Caine plays a former army man whose son (Nigel Havers), a Russian translator for British intelligence, is murdered when he stumbles onto the government's scapegoating of an innocent man. Caine's performance in "The Whistle Blower" is one of his very best. Loath to believe that his England engages in the dirty dealings other countries do, Caine's character must come to terms with the fact that his son's death negates everything he has ever thought was true. His finest moment comes shortly after he has to identify his son's body; a functionary brings in his son's belongings in a green garbage bag, and after signing for them, Caine holds up the bag and asks, "I suppose this is cheaper than a cardboard box or something decent?" That's one of the hardest things for any actor to do: to impart a sense of shame to another adult without a trace of self-righteousness. In that one line, Caine lays out something like an ethics of functioning as a human being, an awareness that every moment involves a choice of whether or not to behave humanely.

Through his whole body of work, Caine has raised his voice sparingly, almost always saving overt shows of anger for comic effect. Like the scene in "The Italian Job" where he's sorting out the petty complaints of his crew of thieves before they pull their big job ("Yer not havin' yer me-graine! Yer not bein' sick! An' yer both sittin' in the back of the mini!!"), or the scene in "The Man Who Would Be King" (featuring, in a small part, his wife, Shakira, whom he married after falling in love with her face in a coffee commercial) where a Kaffir he's trying to train in British military discipline can't even count off in time with his fellow recruits ("Billy! Billy! He said it before the others! Not before the others! Not after the others! With the bloody others!!").

The exception is his final scene as small-time theatrical agent Ray Say in "Little Voice." In his early scenes with the astonishing Jane Horrocks as the painfully shy girl whose uncanny vocal imitations he hopes will make him the fortune he has sought for so long, Caine is sweetly seductive, solicitous of the girl. She's his gold mine, but he cares for her as well. "Little Voice" is one of those unfortunate movies in which characters are finally no more than the sum of their worst impulses, but Caine explodes the cheap misanthropy. His hopes dashed, his pockets bare, he mounts the stage in the sort of crummy nightclub where, for years, he has wheedled and cajoled the slimy owners to book his pathetic acts. Letting out all the contempt he has held in for decades, Caine launches into a lacerating, self-pitying version of Roy Orbison's "It's Over." He's like a mad bomber using the song as dynamite strapped to his chest, determined to detonate it and drag everyone around down with him.

That lightness that does not exclude depth is precisely why Caine is so menacing in his villain roles. He's the hero in "Get Carter," Mike Hodges' macho pulp thriller, which has achieved mythic status in Britain. But Caine plays British gangster Carter, returned to his hometown in the bleak industrial north to find the men who murdered his brother, as if he were a villain. He tosses off the most cutting remarks (and dispatches his enemies) with ice-cold aplomb. In a scene in which he runs into an old despised acquaintance and presses him for information, Caine doesn't allow Carter's contempt to come out until the end of the scene, and he does it so frigidly you feel years sliding off the other guy's life. Lifting the man's sunglasses off, he says, "Do you know, I'd almost forgotten what your eyes looked like. They're still the same. Piss holes in the snow."

Caine appears only intermittently in Neil Jordan's "Mona Lisa," but those appearances are vivid enough to turn the film's pulp-romantic dream into a nightmare. As Mortwell, the underworld king whose fingers are in every sordid pie that presents itself to him, Caine more than lives up to the character's name. Oozing Vitalis more than vitality, looking puffy and sated in his too-tight polo shirts and Members Only jackets, Caine is a walking portrait of death in life. His droopy eyelids belong to someone who willed his conscience and emotions dead a long time ago. For all the paunch that's a sign of Mortwell's success, he might as well be a death's head, his quiet threatening air a looming reminder to all who encounter him of their final destination.

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