MovieChat Forums > Alfie (1966) Discussion > SPOILER: can someone explain. . .?

SPOILER: can someone explain. . .?

posted 16 years ago by miriamwebster
3 replies | jump to latest

. . .the abortion scene? After Lily comes to Alfie's flat for an abortion on the kitchen table, the abortionist explains that he only induced--but did not perform--the procedure. The implication is that he did something that will soon cause Lily (now sitting in the living room in obvious pain) to lose the baby in short order. Yet when Alfie returns to the apartment, he bursts into tears after seeing the (off-screen) fetus on the kitchen table. Huh? At the risk of getting too clinical, a woman in the throes of aborting a child would have laid on a bed or floor, gone into bathroom--anything but climb back up onto the kitchen table. Any explanations?

[–] jessieanchor 16 years ago

(Has been a while since I watched, so could well be wrong) but..

I don't recall any implication that Lily got up onto the table at all. Alfie's flat is pretty small, and just has that curtained off section. Poor woman had just given birth to an induced stillborn fetus - I suspect she hardly knew *what* to do with 'it'. She couldn't put it in the bin, wasn't going to pop it in her handbag (!) So she lay it on the table. Behind the curtain. Maybe in a cloth or tea-towel. Seems reasonable.

Then Alfie bursts in, and doesn't expect (although it would only have been tiny) - to see a baby in minature.

Is my take on it, from memory.

[–] Abe_Raman 16 years ago

I would have thought it was in a pot or bowl, rather than laid on the table. Because I would think that a certain volume of blood and vaginal mucus would have been expelled along with the foetus, and Lily could have collected this efficiently in a kitchen bowl or, as I say, pot. And so she passes the foetus out from inside of her body while in the living room (on the settee, perhaps?) and catches the spillage in the bowl/pot, before transferring the pot/bowl to an unspecified location in the kitchen (on the table, or a sideboard).

Or it could be as has been suggested, with Lily climbing up atop the table in order to expel the foetus downwards on to the table (while being careful not to fall off the table). But equally, she could have suspended the foetus from the kitchen ceiling on a piece of string - though to be fair I saw nothing in the camera-angles or Alfie's gaze to suggest that he'd seen it there like that, swinging. Perhaps film-makers should take a lesson from this and make sure everything is made 100% explicitly clear in their films, to prevent certain viewers arriving at illogical and bizarre conclusions.

[–] Fdsrew 16 years ago

I assumed it was just lying on the floor. She probably dragged herself in agony as far as she could and it was wherever she ended up.