Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice
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Movie Reviews of Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice
Movie Review: One of My All Time Favorites
Summary: 5 Stars
This is my favorite film from the 1960's. It is a brave and humane film. In the middle of the sexual revolution, Mazursky dared to say- "Maybe we aren't sexual robots- maybe we are people- with limitations- and maybe that's ok." The ending is one of my favorites in film history- it is not pretentious- it is raw and beautiful and real- maybe too real for some. After all the soul searching and attempts at being sexual revolutionaries, our heroes are exposed. They are just ordinary married couples. They won't be participating in the planned "orgy", but the search for connectedness and love will continue. The ending is a throwback to the beginning of the film where Bob and Carol had the weekend therapy session. One of the exercises was to look into someones eyes and really see them. Rather than using people as sex toys (or worse turning yourself into one), this film is advocating love and the valiant attempt to truly understand others.
To say that sentiment is pretentious is nothing more than libertine posturing.
Movie Review: Way back when
Summary: 4 Stars
A sex farce that is unfortunately frozen in the time period in which it was made. The four principal characters are best friends living in the vapid and empty void known as California in the late 1960s. Director-writer Paul Mazursky makes fun of all the pseudo hippness of LA-LA land, which culminates with the four characters deciding, in the spirit of the times, to have an orgy together. They all end up in bed staring at each other, lost. For a look at the pseudo psychobabbling California lifestyle of the late 60s, it's a howl - but it hasn't dated very well. It's a moment captured perfectly, but the moment has passed. After seeing it once, there's no desire to see it again; for a younger crowd that hasn't lived through those times, the movie might not seem like anything at all. Robert Culp, Natalie Wood, Elliott Gould, and Dyan Cannon are the actors involved in this ambitious but dated movie.Movie Review: Gratuitous Indulgences Of The Idle Rich
Summary: 5 Stars
Mazursky scores a bullseye in this scathing satire of the Mid-60s sexual liberation movement as documented by Gay Telese in 'Thy Neighbors Wife' as well as the burgeoning primal screaming, reflexive listening that would eventually degenerate into the 70's cults (EST - satirized in 'Big Fix' with Richard Dreyfuss as BEST) that would be a substitute for many for ACTUAL therapy. What is so hilarious is how straight all the roles are played. I couldn't stop laughing when Elliot Gould, still green about matters touchy/feely painfully tries to extricate himself from beneath Robert Culp and Natalie Wood as they, during a dinner get together with friends, begin making love on the couch on top of him!
Only someone with the cash to afford all the retreats, books, lectures, therapists, and most importantly, the TIME to indulge to their heart's content the nit picking of micro-managed conversation with grandiose assumptions of their and everyone else's motives before smothering it all beneath a sanitized shroud of complete moral neutrality.
About 40 minutes in the movies various themes all coalesque around this ONE area: extramarital relations - and this is where Mazursky takes the film completely over the top.
Culp, in his quest for complete OPENNESS confesses an affair he had the previous weekend to wife Natalie Wood. With a headful of mountain top retreat indoctrination she loves him all the more for it. She feels compelled with her own quest for absolute transparency to share this news with the couple's friends Ted and Alice (Gould and Cannon). Cannon is driven berserk and Bob's infidelity which taps into her own issues leading to a exasperating all night rap session with hubby Ted.
When Ted ruminates over his own lack of extramarital affairs he's not sure if he has a CLEAN slate or an empty one!!
And it's all downhill (or uphill depending) from there to a nearly complete (to me) incomprehensible ending.
Great ensemble acting all around!
Movie Review: Contemporary Psychobabble Dates Badly
Summary: 3 Stars
BOB AND CAROL AND TED AND ALICE starts off as if a stoned hippie with an 8mm cam began to film cinema verite and did not wish to infringe on the rights of an equally stoned cast to get the scene right in the first take. Somewhere in this turgid bloated mess of a psychodrama are some unpleasant truths about the way married couples confront personal and sexual disconnections, but this relevant set of subtexts is hidden under an annoying coating of a 60s mentality of free love, beads, primal scream therapy, and groupsex, all of which date what otherwise have been some eternal truisms.Robert Culp is Bob, a 40 something successful businessman who is less a fully-fleshed individual than a stereotyped hippie weekend wannabe who wants the freedom to have affairs but is unwilling to give his wife Carol (Natalie Wood) the same right. Bob is not just a man in search of himself. He comes across as an annoying pest who likes to think of himself as a new age guru who believes that he personifies the adage of Do Your Own Thing. Naturally, anyone who dares to show conventional middle class moral objections to his philandering is dismissed as a fuddy duddy out of touch with his own feelings. Carol is even less of a believable person as she skates through life with her feet barely touching the moral ground of life. Director Paul Mazursky allows the viewer to get an idea of how and why Bob and Carol think and act. At the start of the film, they attend a group interaction session led by a therapist who exhorts his patients to engage in some questionable methods: they scream, beat pillows, gawk about the room, and stare into one another's eyes as if to connect on a visual level.
Ted (Eliot Gould) and Alice (Dyan Cannon) are more open with their vulnerabilities, and hence engage us more. Both are disgusted at first with the open fooling around of Bob and Carol. Ted wants more frequent sex with Alice but does not know how to handle her rejection of him. Despite his geekiness, Ted comes across as a reasonably moral man whose own limits are soon to be tested first by a wife whose burgeoning sexuality snaps to attention then later by his own crumbling wall of marital fidelity.
The second half of the film is more interesting than that of the first. The cloying irritability that dominates the first half is replaced by several humorous, yet revealing vignettes that culminate with all four in bed and not knowing or daring what to do. The hesitant expressions on their faces suggest that morality is not a blanket to be donned or doffed at will. BOB AND CAROL AND TED AND ALICE is a potent, if misguided moral fairy tale that warns us that the freedom to be superficially open may in fact be nothing more than a license to hide behind that blanket of openness.
Movie Review: Amusing and Intriguing
Summary: 4 Stars
Certainly a movie that has publicized the sexual revolution of the sixties and seventies. Very interesting how Bob and Carol's carefree attitude about sex eventually loosens up Ted and Alice's more conservative ways. Its interesting how Bob and Carol test their relationship with their affairs. Amusing how Carol is quicker to be more accepting of their individual affairs than Bob. Ted and Alice at first are appalled by each of their infidelities. However when they hear the reasons behind their actions, they lighten up their approaches. Bob and Carol truly love each other where their affairs are merely for recreational purposes.
Those who are intrigued by psychology or the free love generation of the late sixties will be specially interested in this video.