Sweet November (1968)

Sandy Dennis turns in another mesmerizing and moving performance in Sweet November. Here she loves and helps one man per month, because a week was too short a term and a year is too long. A month is perfect. They move in and she begins to help them with what they think they need or what she thinks they need. But at the beginning of the film, October is throwing a fit. She meets Anthony Newley while renewing their driver's licenses and he eventually becomes November. "I think November is going to be a sweet month," Sandy says. He can't move in though, because it's late October and to be fair, he has to wait until the first of November. He puts his job on hold. (His company makes boxes, you know those 6-sided ones.) "But why don't they ever make a 7-sided box?" Sandy asks. Sandy Dennis has never been as vulnerable and complex since her performance in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" And the film is expert at showing and handling the realities of love, loneliness, and dependency. But what's his problem? What does she do for him? Does he make such a impression on her life that she forgoes the routine of a new man a month? Do they live happily ever after? Watch "Sweet November." You may never see the month of November the same again.

Sweet November was one of those 1960s movies that aspired to be great. The conversations between the characters were incredibly talky like most 1960s Broadway plays and not like real people talk but hey it's a movie, why not? I was ready to buy into the fantasy. It's also fun to see New York as it was collapsing into Mayor Lindsay chaos. The sad thing is Sweet November ended up being propaganda to push a still somewhat uptight country into a complete breakdown of marriage. Infatuation is presented as "true love", perhaps the most destructive concept Hollywood ever foisted on an gullible public and the especially vulnerable Baby Boomers who were coming of age in Sacred '68. My god, one wouldn't even know how a woman behaved during her full menstrual cycle before your month of sexual access was over. How incredibly naive. Anthony Newley is quite compelling and gets you to root for him. How sad his career was about to implode. He was such a talent that he couldn't focus in one direction and go with it. We have nobody like him today. Too bad he wasted his talents promoting such a cancerous message to America.Now we have the fruit of Sweet November: an almost 50% illegitimacy rate and children growing up without fathers. Sweet November defies science that tells us women bond to the men they sleep with thanks to the wonder hormone "oxytocin". But the radical feminism so in vogue in those heady days of the 1960s of radicals like Germaine Greer was expressed in the plot that women must be sluts to destroy their dog-like devotion to men and be free of enslaving patriarchy. Sweet November is an interesting historical piece that someday will be exhumed to show why America collapsed from within.

I saw this film as a very young adult when it first came out. I have never forgotten it. Sandy Dennis was a fabulous character actress who appeared in several movies containing socially provocative subject matters not previously well-explored in "polite circles"; in other words, in general release. For sure, there were other films addressing titillating lifestyle choices, but the overriding end-message was that if you stray from the accepted societal path, bad things will happen to you (Butterfield 8, Suddenly Last Summer, come to mind.)For those of us growing up in the '60s, society began changing in profound ways that afforded opportunities for self-expression and self- determination previously smothered in veneers of inhibition. Today,there is no societal inhibition...there is literally no subject matter that hasn't been addressed in graphic and/or grotesque detail. I believe a certain handful of films in the relationship genre will have real staying power (Brokeback Mountain). Other films may only be historically significant to individuals uniquely affected by that film, or to film buffs and other super-serious film students/teachers.Rarely does a remake of the original film meet or exceed the goal set by the original, perhaps because the times have just changed too markedly. That was certainly the case here. For me, the Charlize Theron reprise of Sandy Dennis's original role was almost unwatchable, and I like Charlize Theron. I just didn't much care about her, how she lived, or what fate befell her in the remake. Society had moved on.Now, the Hilary Swank characters in Boys Don't Cry and Million Dollar Baby...there were young woman you could care about, as much as I cared about Sandy Dennis's character back in the day. Predictably, however, when those characters eschewed inhibition and embraced self-expression and determination, bad things happened. In our collective societal consciences, then, have we really moved on all that far?

I only saw this movie one time and that was when it was first released, over 30 years ago. But this movie was such a sweet yet bitter sweet movie that I have never forgotten it. The story was so powerful that it has lasted in my memory for 3 decades. Maybe it was because it was the kind of love that i longed for; one that is total and complete. Then ends never to be found again.