There are very few good movies from the sixties and this is certainly not one of them. But any movie with Peter Sellers has something going for it. I guess.
A thirty-something square falls in love with a hippie and decides to "drop out" himself.
Director:
Hy Averback
It all revolves around grass brownies. Didn't every movie in the sixties toy with this? It seems like it. Too bad it wasn't better but it is a time piece.
13 comments:
Patti - Oh, I hadn't thought of this movie in forever! And the title is one of those unusual ones that sort of stays with you. Thanks for bringing it back.
It is indeed a period piece. When we first saw it in the late 60's we liked it a lot (you don't have to be Jewish to appreciate all the humor but it doesn't hurt) but it has not aged well over the years. The one thing that stood out at the time was Sellers' amazingly good accent. In those days there didn't seem to be that many British actors doing flawlessy authentic American accents.
What ever happened to Leigh Taylor Young?
Jeff M.
She was on peyton place at the time, I think. Pretty but not much of an actress. Was she married to Ryan O'Neil for a while?
Incidentally, the "pot brownies" bit has not completely gone away, as Dave Barry makes funny use of it in his recent Insane City.
Jeff M.
Missed this one. As I grow older, I feel less and less nostalgia for the 60s and (certainly) the 70s. For Sellers, though, I would make an exception.
Patti, she was indeed married to O'Neal for six years. She appeared on DALLAS and PICKET FENCES in recurring roles but this "fact" from Wikipedia blew me away (as we said in the 60's):
She was a favorite of playwright Samuel Beckett, and toured Los Angeles, New York City, London and Edinburgh in one of his last works, The Beckett Plays. In 1984, she starred opposite Donald Davis in Beckett's one act play Catastrophe at the Edinburgh International Festival.
Also, Taylor-Young is an ordained minister in the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness, which was co-founded by her partner, John Morton.
Jeff M.
So the sixties stuck with her!
I will take issue with the notion of there being very few good films out of the '60s...but it wasn't the best decade at all for typically "professional" studio product, which is what I suspect you mean...though some good examples even there, even if they tend to be to some extent maverick projects, or incorporating more sophisticated elements, such as BULLITT or IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT...
Well, if you compare it to the seventies or fifties, it seems wanting. Probably no worse than this century so far though.
Hm. I'd have to think long and hard about that. There was a little knot of good (and a horde of not good) film-school grad stuff in the early '70s...but the '70s also saw the ascent of Spielberg/Lucas/imitator crap and the BILLY JACK/Burt Reynolds axis of overblown drive-in movies...while for every solid piece of work in the '50s, seems like there was yet another THE SUBTERRANEANS, the kind of thing that MAD mocked so thoroughly with "BOOK! MOVIE!"....
It was an interesting flick, but almost completely forgettable. I vaguely remember Peter Sellers in it; I do remember Leigh Taylor-Young (because she was so cute) and Lou Gottlieb (as Louis Gottlieb)playing a guru. Gottlieb had been the frontman for the folk group The Limelighters.
I missed the sixties - can't remember much of it - though I lived through it and did NO drugs. Go figure.
But if IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT is the best film out of that time, it's ok with me. That is a movie that never grows old.
Looking back on Peter Sellers he doesn't seem as funny now as he was then. Though in A SHOT IN THE DARK, he still makes me laugh.
A so-so film, I think. I agree with Todd that it wasn't that bad of a decade, though. It's also important to think of "the Sixties" as really two half-decades. 1960 - 1964 were more like Fifties continuation while 1965-1969 were more paired with the early Seventies.
However, consider: PSYCHO, BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY'S, LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, DR. STRANGELOVE, 2001, THE GRADUATE, BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID, MIDNIGHT COWBOY, THE BIRDS, ROSEMARY'S BABY, even THE SOUND OF MUSIC. Not a bad lot, certainly, and really that just scratches the surface. There were Eastwood's spaghetti westerns, THE GUNS OF NAVARONE, and of course the first three James Bond films.
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