It’s 2018 and I’m not sure why we don’t seem able make movies like this anymore. Envelope-pushing comedies that are every bit as insightful as they are sexy and dirty. Films that are seriously made for adults. For a kid, it would, at best, be a fascinating glimpse through the cracked bedroom door of well-to-do married couples. The glamorous world of grown-ups. Nobody here ever explains themselves, at least not convincingly (and that’s intentional), and some its most important points pivot on quiet moments that the film expects the audience to understand.
My best guess when it comes to what’s changed is that in 1969, a frank approach to sex in the movies (no innuendo, no cute suggestion, just pure straight talk) was still new and exciting and dangerous. In some ways, the breakthrough in the late 60s in which mainstream movies were allowed to curse and show nudity and show drug use and let people talk how people really talk was every bit as huge as the introduction of sound and natural color. The idea of using this brilliant new tool for shock value alone didn’t register at all with some of the new breed of American directors who were all hopped-up on foreign and independent films that had these freedoms for years already. Guys like director/co-writer Paul Mazursky (a 39-year-old veteran television writer who you can tell here was clearly hot to direct a big auteur statement) saw it as a way for Hollywood films to finally join the real conversations that the rest of the world was already having.
It was a major hit in 1969, but if made today, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice would be pure arthouse fare. It trusts its audience too much.
It’s also a top-shelf brilliant comedy about the state of marriage in the age of late 1960s free love. It remains relevant in 2018 because, even if the terms have changed, our culture continues to grope at some kind of perfect sensitivity. We’re always tossing out the conventions of previous generations and trying something new. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. The people of the future will decide what they want to keep and what they want to trash.
In 1969, this idea of “free love” was all the rage in some circles. Sleep around. Don’t lie about it. Stop treating one night stands as dirty secrets. As one character here says “the truth is always beautiful”.
But how does this work when you’re married in your 30s or 40s with a house and children?
Paul Mazursky tries to figure that out by telling the stories of two settled couples who are also close friends. Robert Culp and a ravishing Natalie Wood (seriously, my God, I was constantly shoving my tongue back into my mouth) attend one of these love-circle meetings where people hold hands and share their feelings. The two do it for completely impersonal reasons. Culp is a documentary filmmaker and he’s doing research for a film that he wants to make about this mumbo-jumbo and Wood tags along.
But then a funny thing happens. Culp and Wood get converted. They start off smirking—and then they end up crying and confessing like everyone else.
Next thing you know, they’re all on board with the “free love” train. They cheat on each other and they admit it. It’s hard to take at first (especially for him), but they eventually get over it, accept it, smile about it and become true blue avatars for the new way of thinking.
Meanwhile, their two more traditional married friends, Elliot Gould and Dyan Cannon, don’t know what to make of this. In fact, Gould and Cannon are having horrible, messy, unwinnable (and totally believable) arguments over their feelings about it. They’re having all of the arguments that Culp and Wood aren’t having. (And Gould and Cannon both earned Oscar nominations for tackling their complex roles.)
It all comes to a head when these four friends take a trip to Las Vegas together and share a hotel suite. What results is stirring and beautiful and leaves you with a lot to talk about afterward.
It’s a great film in which Mazursky steers comedy into unexpectedly serious places and leads drama into unexpectedly funny places and it works. Because we are in wild territory here. The old rules no longer apply.
And Mazursky takes full advantage of that and really gets away with something.