Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice

Dir: Paul Mazursky

1969

*****

Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice is one of those rare films that is very much of its time but still feels timeless and indeed fresh. Released in 1969, it was filmed just one year after the infamous ‘Summer of love’ but looked at America’s new found openness and sexual awareness from a totally different angle. The establishment had poked fun at the hippies quite a bit by this point and various sex comedies leaped at the opportunity without really harnessing the cultural change that society was going through. Hippies and flower power were current but they didn’t represent everyone. Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice looks at a successful group of late twenties/early thirty somethings and how a sexual revolution effects them. The film begins with husband and wife Bob & Carol (played by Robert Culp and Natalie Wood) who attend a weekend of emotional honesty in an Esalen-style retreat somewhere in the California hills. Bob is doing research for a documentary he is making and is initially unconvinced by the openness of the group and how it supposedly helps with modern relationships. Carol on the other hand is immediately taken by the new philosophy and soon reels in her husband. After two days the couple are changed and become eager to share their enthusiasm and excitement over their new-found philosophy with their more conservative friends Ted and Alice (played by Elliott Gould and Dyan Cannon). The humor is never cheap and the subject is never played for laughs except from when Ted suggests he ‘feels’ like Bob should pick up the dinner tab. This is what works so well throughout the film, it’s subtle and believable. Instead of a mad-cap sex comedy, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice works better because it is more like theatre. When Bob admits to having an affair, Carol almost celebrates it because of his honesty, which throws Ted and Alice and their opinions of relationships and their friends in to total disarray. The script is sharp as a knife and the performances are brilliant. I’m a huge fan of Elliott Gould and Natalie Wood but Dyan Cannon is superb, as is Robert Culp. The film was no doubt seen as risky for some actors, with some big names such as Warren Beatty, Robert Redford, Steve McQueen, Tuesday Weld, Jane Fonda and Faye Dunaway turning down lead roles. A mistake they no doubt regretted when both Elliott Gould and Dyan Cannon were nominated for Academy Awards and Natalie Wood, who turned down the $750,000 fee for a percentage instead, made $5,000,000. It deserved all the praise it received but the award I think it best deserved was for best screenplay. The script – and subsequent performances – have a real spark of electricity about them, more so then most ‘romantic’ films made then or since. The conclusion is also something rather special. The mood of the film is captured brilliantly by Quincy Jones’s score, featuring songs by Burt Bacharach and Hal David. The cinematography was one of the last pieces made by the legendary Charles Lang – it didn’t really need such beautiful visuals but it is certainly better for them. It’s certainly Paul Mazursky’s best loved film (and I love all his films) and one of the best for each cast and crew person involved. It’s the perfect film to end a decade on, the best representation of relationships in the end of he sixties and the beginning of the seventies I can think of. Something of a forgotten classic.