Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969)

I can remember when this movie was released back in 1969. I was only 12 at the time but I kept hearing about this controversial film that was released that people were shocked by. I wasn't old enough to see it but even MAD magazine did parodied the movie. So naturally when I got older and had a chance to see the movie I was anxious to learn what the controversy was all about. That came when the movie made its way to video. I watched it unimpressed and wondering what the controversy was all about.Now here we are almost 50 years later and the movie makes its way to a new blu-ray edition via Twilight Time. Remembering what I thought of the film years before I decided to try it again and see if I had missed something back then or if it truly was one of those groundbreaking films to come out of the sixties. The end result was that I did see it through different eyes but it didn't make the film that much better.Ted Sanders (Robert Culp) is a documentary film makers who goes to an Esalen-type retreat with his wife Carol (Natalie Wood) thinking that perhaps there is a film to be made about the place. If you're unfamiliar with Esalen it was one of those counter-culture pop psychology type groups where people would try to get in touch with their inner feelings. At a 24 hour session Bob and Carol open up to the group and to one another and find a peace in their ability to be completely honest with everyone.They return home and later go to dinner with their friends Ted (Elliott Gould) and Alice (Dyan Cannon), a conservative couple they're best friends with. They can't talk enough about how wonderful the experience was and when Ted doubts them they try to get him to open up. The thing is every time he says something they don't agree with they call it a cop out until he laments and tells them what they want to here at which point they praise him. Their "enlightenment" goes so far that Carol tries to open up with their waiter making Alice uncomfortable. We're supposed to see Alice as the one with the hang ups but for me she becomes the sanest member of the group.Ted goes to San Francisco for work and while there has a one night stand. When he returns home he tells Carol about it. Surprised at first she then praises him for being open and honest with her. Which surprises Ted who then seems disappointed that she wasn't upset of jealous. For all his bluster about what he supposedly learned at his core Ted is still that "square" inside. After a dinner party the four smoke grass and act silly before Ted and Alice begin to leave. Running out to tell them how much she loves them Carol breaks the news to them about Ted's affair still thinking how wonderful it was. On their way home Alice can't control her anger about the situation and gets physically ill. When they get home she can't stop talking about it as they go to bed. This leads to the funniest and most frustrating parts of the film as Ted wants to fool around but Alice is in no mood. Frustrated he wants to go for a walk but while uninterested in sex she doesn't want him to leave their bed. A second trip to San Francisco for Bob finds him turn down another one night stand to return home early. Except that he finds another man in his bed. Unlike his wife he gets upset and rages at first before she calms him down and they once more talk about feelings and how this is nothing more than sex with no love or attachment involved. Which leads to another funny moment.All of this culminates with the couples dealing with their own issues, a visit to the psychiatrist by Alice, another quick affair and the four of them heading off for a weekend trip to Vegas to see Tony Bennett. The end result of their trip is more revelations and a potential foursome between them all, a final breakdown of acceptance for the "enlightened" to initiate the squares. The movie can be confusing at times. Is it an endorsement of the results of the sexual revolution of the sixties or an indictment? Is it supporting it or condemning it? The sexual revolution opened doors for people to talk but like Pandora's box it also unleashed a flood of bad things as well. STDs reached epidemic proportions, marriage took a nose dive and divorces increased. The traditional family was torn apart and the anything goes attitude was embraced. In its wake the rubble was sifted through and some things recovered. Other not quite so as we've seen the addiction and availability of pornography increase and the family structure still not quite recovered.While watching the film I kept thinking about the characters and the location their story takes place in. Both are affluent couples who because of their wealth and status can afford to take the time for things like this retreat as opposed to hard working blue collar workers who don't have the time or inclination to do so. For those couples life is working and having the nice home and 2.5 kids, happy to do so. It is the bored upper class that always seems to find a need to explore things out of their boredom. People jokingly refer to California as the "land of flakes and nuts" which seems a bit harsh. But you have to admit that the state does tend to welcome the most over the top life styles and concepts. This is in large part due to the film industry itself providing wealth that leads to boredom for so many in the public's eye. My guess is you don't hear much about crew workers on films doing these sort of things because they're the folks based in reality making far less money but working equally hard. California gets its reputation based on what we're told by news and mass media with stories about celebrities, hangers on and scammers promising enlightenment if you just come to a retreat where you can scream away your pain for $99.99 per day. The film here is well made and looks great. The actors do an amazing job with Cannon standing out as someone who wants to stick with her beliefs and ideas but who is basically bullied into following the lead of the rest. It isn't a bullying involving insults or fists but one of if you're not enlightened like us then you must be the one who is wrong. This was the first feature film director Paul Mazursky made and it provided enough interest for him to build a career on. His films were always character driven and interesting well-made movies. For me this one wasn't among the best. It definitely feels dated. Some may remember it fondly, for me it was just there. I will say that Twilight Time has once more done a great job with this one. We're offered the film in blu-ray with a hi-def 1080p presentation. And they've included plenty of extras to enjoy including an isolated music track, an audio commentary track with film historians Julie Kirgo and Nick Redman, an audio commentary track with Mazursky, Culp, Gould and Cannon and TALES OF BOB & CAROL & TED & ALICE a featurette with Mazursky being interviewed. This release is, as with all Twilight Time releases, limited to just 3,000 copies so fans should act quickly if they want one.

Debut splashes, Paul Mazursky's BOB & CAROL & TED & ALICE is a biting satire channels the experiment of "openness" in human correlations through its epoch's sex liberation ethos. The four protagonists are two married couples who are each other's closest friends, Bob (Culp) and Carol (Wood) Sanders, Ted (Gould) and Alice (Cannon) Henderson.In its opening aerial shots, a preamble shows Bob and Carol attending a group therapy (denoted by nudism and t'aichi) during a weekend getaway and culminating in the mutual opening of their true feelings towards each other. Returning to L.A., the couple decides to proselytize their newly acquired enlightenment into their day-to-day life, Carol's blunt bash with a maître d' doesn't pan out well, and Ted joshes his "feelings" for laughter's sake. Bob's confession of a one-night-stand happened during his trip in San Francisco, meets with Carol's thorough understanding and even affection, for acknowledging him being bravely honest, but when Carol casually drops the bomb to Ted and Alice, after a pot-sharing get-together, the tidings overtly ruffle their feathers (Alice is physically sick afterwards). During their pillow talk, Ted and Alice have a spat over which of Bob's act should be accountable for the whammy, the confession or the cheating? Later the scenario segues into a heated argument about their own marital hiccups, which are boiled down to the discrepancy between their "in the mood" timings, nudge nudge. Rather, Alice is the more prudish type and totally blindsided by Bob's infidelity and Carol's irrational magnanimity, but in a session with her shrink, Alice reveals her aversion of physical touch and makes a Freudian slip of her suppressed attraction to Bob, the one she claims to be repulsed by, which validates Mazursky's astute insight in the sheer dichotomy between one's outward conviction and innate id, moreover, in a later development, he trenchantly eschews the blasé double-standard recrimination when allows Carol being caught red-handed during her physical emancipation with another stud by an unwitting Bob, which spurs a comical catharsis throwing off any surplus of macho ego. The quartet winds up in an orgiastic attempt during their Las Vegas suite-sharing sojourn, the money shot is actuated by Bob and Carol's mutual leniency in adulterous impulse and Ted's admission of his recent affair, but roundly broached by an exasperating Alice when her last shield is breached. Appended their experiment with a sober coda in concert with the rousing anthem WHAT THE WORLD NEEDS NOW IS LOVE, penned by Hal David and Burt Bacharach, sung by Jackie DeShannon, Mazursky's relationship, friendship dissecting film ultimately extracts a prudent message, whereas libido often culminates in an ephemeral thrill, there are many things in our live are (way) more important than sex, keeping a sane mind when you are pursuing your carnal desire. A cracking foursome stalwartly shores up the intriging narrative, Natalie Wood beautifully combines her wide-eyed gaiety ("you are so beautiful" never loses its earnestness in her intonation) with a disarming maturity that tells more about her faculty if she is given time to mellow; Robert Culp exerts eloquently his devilish charm and a hirsute Elliott Gould impresses as the charming wise-cracker with a patina of faux-naïf self-awareness. But for my money, the biggest assets is the transcendent Dyan Cannon (freshly striving for a career after her divorce with Cary Grant), her Alice is arguably the most conventional and relatable character among the four and she gives a galvanizing, uncompromising thrust that grants first-timer Mazursky's hipster, boundary-exploring dramedy some thumping heartbeats.

I feel that the director sold the idea of the movie to the studios as a hip sex comedy film. Then he went out and purposely made a serious film for its time. And when it came time to release it, the studio continued to sell it a sex comedy, which it isn't. There is humor, but not laugh out funny.What Mazursky did was capture moments of the relationships and tied them up beautifully. The first scene is amusing as Bob and Carol go to a remote retreat to discover themselves. The other interesting moment was when Alice and Ted are going to bed and just found out about Bob's infidelity and how disgusted they are that Carol has accepted it. Some argue that it is too long a scene, but that's what makes it amusing, watching Elliott Gould brilliantly attempting to have sex with Alice, but she is in no mood. This playful event is worth watching alone for the acting abilities of Gould and Dyan Cannon.The other great scene is when Bob rejects another fling to go home earlier and finds Carol with the tennis instructor. How it unravels is pure delight and shines the light on man's hypocrisy that it's okay for them to sleep around, but for the wife! Bob eventually comes around and accepts the situation with a great moment in cinema history.The final scene when they all get it on together is played wonderfully. But when they get to that bed, they all realize the situation they are in. Are they able to handle the reality of an orgy? A poignant moment played without dialogue right to the final frame. The very end scene is pure homage to Fellini's 8 1/2 as the characters come out of the casino with a crowd and they all march in a circle and then group together.A very interesting piece of cinema history, and one worth tracking down. Maybe out of date, but it sure shows us the period that it was aimed at, a period were it was time to liberate the mind and soul. We may need it again, as there are now evil forces attempting to shut down the human spirit for financial gain.

The ending to Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice is not a "cop-out" in the conventional sense. Although many people may have wanted to see the characters go all the way just to see what happens, it was inevitable that they give in and not do it. The cop-out exists mainly in the realm of counterculture values. The characters in the film had been preaching free love constantly, and even went so far as to deliberately have sexual affairs with other people just to prove to each other that they really believed in their values of sexual freedom. If they were so free, why couldn't they swap couples and have sex with each other? Its a cop-out that we don't get to see these members of the counterculture living up to their own words. They say they are sexually free, but are they really? I would have liked to see how the four would have dealt with the emotional consequences of making love with each other's soul mate. The effects of such an orgy would be mentally devastating- which is clearly why they avoided it in the end. This decision pokes a hole in the free-love movement, and begins to question the true meaning of love and relationships. It seems that while people are capable of affairs with strangers, they are never truly free to have sex with anyone. As an audience, we begin to realize that the counterculture is not as free as it seems to be. Free love sounds like an amazing idea- empty sex with whomever, whenever, and no one has any emotional ties or consequences. Yet it may not be truly freedom.Bob and Carol go out of their way to visit a new-age, counterculture Guru at a psychedelic therapy session. They learn how to get out all their negative emotions, and gain a freer perspective on life, love, and sex. They think that they have been elevated to a new level of consciousness, and are no longer bound by the conventional rules of the establishment in regards to relationships. Bob and Carol are released from jealousy, and are capable of having sex with anyone with no emotional flack, and still carry on a natural, loving relationship with each other. In fact, they are so adamant about it, that they try to convince their friends, Ted and Alice, to think the same way. This ideal soon begins to break down, however. When Bob tells Carol about his affair with a blonde woman, he is shocked and agitated to find that Carol doesn't seem to care. In fact, she responds in a loving and nurturing manner, and even comforts Bob for having gone through such an experience. Bob is initially outraged- his natural human instincts are kicking in for a moment- and he thinks that if Carol doesn't mind then she must not really love him. Carol gently explains that its all okay, and reminds him of his new free-love values, and that no harm is done. Eventually Bob agrees. Not much later, Bob comes home to find Carol in bed with a stranger. Initially he is outraged and hurt, like any normal person would be- but soon he comes to his senses and realizes that its all okay and its just sex with no love. He even offers the stranger a drink. As an audience, we at first think that such a lifestyle could be possible and even enjoyable- as it removes jealousy, anger, hatred, and many other horrible relationship problems. Yet in the end, we realize that all this freedom from emotions is actually just a suppression of true emotion. Bob is truly jealous and protective of Carol, and is incredibly hurt to find that she would cheat on him- however, the counterculture values have taught him to unnaturally suppress these human emotions that spring from his love for Alice. Instead, he attempts a kind of stoicism towards his feelings, and replaces his real love for Alice with a fake, open-ended, suppressive kind of love. It can't really even be considered love at all,. Its simply unjust to yourself to suppress your desire to love and jealously protect your lover. This is the nature of the free-love movement, and Mazursky chose to end the film in such as way that expresses this to the fullest. Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice are not emotionally capable of an orgy, and they end up giving in and accepting the fact that there is such a thing as a monogamous relationship. They truly love their lovers, and no one else. Sex cannot always be just sex. Humans are not machines- we cannot shut of our emotions at will. This is what makes us human.In the end, Paul Mazursky is not just poking fun at the counterculture with funny situational incidents, but is making a profound critique of their values. He wants the audience to leave the film questioning these values of free love, and come to terms with their human nature.