Octoberfilms: Häxan / Witchcraft Through the Ages — Danish diabolism

So far, my Octoberfilms posts this year have focused on the movies of Vincent Price, in honor of his centennial, starting with The House on Haunted Hill, The Abominable Dr. Phibes & Dr. Phibes Rises Again, and continuing through his cycle of films for Roger Corman and AIP loosely inspired by the works of Edgar Allan Poe. (I'll be coming back to those shortly.)

But my loyal readers here also know that I'm a fan of movies from the era before sound technology changed cinema forever in 1927. You all know that I'm a regular fanboy of the silent-era comedies, notably (but not exclusively) those of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harold Lloyd. Both Lloyd ("Haunted Spooks," 1920) and Keaton ("The Haunted House," '21) offered their own twists on Halloween-worthy tales, though naturally in shorts showcasing their distinctive comic spins.

On the other hand, some of horror film history's great features likewise come from those years. I'm talking such genre-shaping classics as The Golem (1915/1920), The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919), John Barrymore's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920), Nosferatu (the first "Dracula" in 1922), The Phantom of the Opera (1925), The Cat and the Canary (1927), and The Man Who Laughs (1928).

So I'm going to pick one I haven't pulled out of the DVD shelves for several years. Out of all of them, it's the film that probably best falls under the subgenre category that cinema historians and academics classify as Holy Crap WTF That's Weird. It's from Sweden, 1922.

And yeah, what was it about 1922 anyway? The same year Murnau's Nosferatu showed the world how to make a vampire movie, and Fritz Lang's Dr. Mabuse took a near-supernatural journey to Berlin's criminal underworld, a film opened in Sweden that was to become notorious for its bold depictions of torture, madness, carnality, and — most memorably — horrific acts performed by and for bestial, nightmarish demons, including Satan himself. But while Nosferatu, The Phantom of the Opera, and all the others presented their stories as fiction, filmmaker Benjamin Christensen's Häxan appeared in the guise of a documentary, its very realism at the heart of its hypnotic allure and its scandalous notoriety.

Officially banned outside Sweden for decades due to graphic imagery and an unabashed anti-clerical theme, Häxan has grown into a culty sort-of-classic that for over half a century you might hear about but rarely, if ever, got a chance to actually see.

Is it true that it displays witches cavorting naked with lusty devils? Is a baby really drained of blood before it's tossed into a stew pot? What's this about women lining up to kiss Satan's bulbous ass? Inquisitional torture? Flying on broomsticks? Hysterical nuns? Sacrilege and perversion? Demonic orgies? Otherworldly monstrosities emerging from between an old crone's legs? And it's a documentary? And is there really a version narrated by Beat generation writer and hip icon William S. "The Naked Lunch" Burroughs, complete with acid jazz soundtrack?

It's all true. Häxan (pron. "hexen," meaning "witches") was long available only in rare, diminished forms, the most well known being a 1968 re-edit given the title Witchcraft Through the Ages. That abbreviated version sports the add-on Burroughs' narration and an anarchic musical score featuring jazz violinist Jean-Luc Ponty. 

The best way to check out this infamous curio is the DVD under the Criterion Collection logo. Criterion's disc offers a strikingly beautiful print of the fully restored and re-tinted Häxan, pairing it with the Burroughs version. Its superb audio track features a new score recreated from the film's original list of musical cues.

Plus, Criterion maintains its reputation for delivering a generous assortment of supportive supplemental material — including an audio commentary by Danish silent film scholar Casper Tybjerg, outtakes and test shots, and click-through selections from the centuries-old documents writer/director Christensen used for his diabolical source material.

I'll get into those later on in this post. For now, though, let's pull back the cowl on what I like to call...

The Reefer Madness of devil-worshipping witchcraft movies

It should be stated that Häxan is a documentary to roughly the degree that Citizen Kane is a biopic of William Randolph Hearst. Ostensibly an exposé of religious persecution born from ignorance of science, Häxan can be easily classified as a masterpiece of silent horror — or, when filtered through the bong water of the psychedelic '60s to become Witchcraft Through the Ages, as a trippy exercise in surreal pop filmmaking extravagance.

Christensen drew information and inspiration from the dreaded Malleus Maleficorum (The Hammer of Witches), a 15th century how-to manual on the detection, persecution, and torture of witches, a book Christensen called "the most scurrilous document in the history of the world." Häxan blends documented fact, outrageous fiction, objective observation, hallucination, social commentary, and different levels of representation to keep us from ever being too certain what the director is up to.

Christensen opens the film with a calculated deception titled "Chapter 1: Sources," a dry lecture complete with slideshow of medieval woodcuts and a pointer stick entering the frame to guide our education. So for the first thirteen minutes or so, we're given a classroom course in the cosmology, mythology, and social orders that generated witchcraft hysteria, a contagion that ravaged Europe like a virulent plague throughout the Middle Ages. The approach is academic and condescending toward the ignorance and pious malice that turned harmless ancient folk beliefs into powerful tools for repression and Church-sanctioned mass murder.

But that's just the canny set-up for Häxan's first twist. "Chapter 2: 1488" dramatizes a witch's lair in the darkest of Dark Ages. The decomposed corpse of a hanged thief is relieved of a finger ring — and the finger — as the witch comments that from the odor it's clear that the poor bugger was left swinging a bit too long. She then drops the finger into a potion vat. Various acts of witchery and deviltry play out on elaborate sets and with clever special effects (including stop-motion animation).

The intertitle cards continue a sense of the lecture mode, but soon the film slides into audacious theatricality, replacing a lecturer's notes with boldly visualized vignettes that pull us into a medieval world where demonic beings and profane witches' Sabbaths are as real as the filth, diseases, and squalid conditions that marked European life for centuries.

Christensen goes to great lengths to underline the fact that to the medieval mind sorcery and Satanic presence were not mere superstition. This deeply rooted belief in the existence of witchcraft and its heretical nature bred an "antidote" that was in reality every bit as pernicious as the Hell-spawned forces were believed to be.

So in "Chapter 3: The Trials" and "Chapter 4: The Torture" we witness a clerical tribunal employing brutal confessional aids on an old woman. It's her forced confession that springs the viewer into the most eye-popping and famous scenes in Häxan. As she describes giving birth to demonic "children" — nightmarish insectoid beings straight out of H.P. Lovecraft — and a Satanic Sabbath, women young and old revel in gleeful desecration of holy symbols and partake of unholy acts that include flying through the air on broomsticks, feasting on toads and unbaptized babies, and cheerfully having sex with hideous demons.

Subsequent chapters — there are seven in all — further the roles of the witch-hunters. These religious zealots moved in packs from village to village, ready to perform the most extreme penalties on anyone considered the least bit suspicious or deserving. A victim's innocence was at best an inconvenience difficult to prove, and even that proof might come via methods that left the accused just as dead as a confession would leave her.

As if the devils Sabbath scene wasn't sufficient, Christensen guaranteed Häxan's notoriety by depicting the Church's holy officers as fat, leering, deceitful barbarians more interested in sadism than in dispensing their Lord's benevolent justice. This anti-clericalism may have endeared Häxan to the Surrealists, but in predominantly Catholic countries it helped arm the censors with further ammunition to use against it.

Not even convents are immune to Satan's devastating influences, even though flagellation and self-torture were means of purifying oneself against the rampant diabolism. When Sister Cecilia is overcome by his tempting power, the entire nunnery is immediately gripped by madness, blasphemy, and a frenzy of dancing, a scene that's as humorous as it is unnerving.

In Häxan's final scenes, "Chapter 7: 1921," Christensen returns his narrative to solid documentary mode. He parallels the medieval practitioners and victims of witchcraft with modern victims of mental disorder, Freud's concept of female hysteria, and other more (relatively) enlightened social stigmas. The pop psychology and real-world flatness of this section render it less engaging than what came before, and sometimes Christensen's reach for meaning yields unintended results — a statement that witches no longer fly on broomsticks cuts to a woman pilot taking off in her biplane. Similarly, a sauna is equated with a witch's cauldron.

So, yep, there's a taint of 1920s misogyny here. It's mild and even rather quaint now even as it accidentally sets up some parallel between the horrific misogynist hysteria of the Middle Ages and the more antiseptic yet still harmful attitudes prevalent five centuries later.

It's all mesmerizing, voyeuristic, and often more than a bit goofy. The film's uneven flow and varying tone range from ribald humor to macabre excess to coldly objective scientific study. Often it's so bold even by today's standards that it seems as though Christensen was curious to see how much he could get away with. And fortunately it has all aged remarkably well.

The Devil's in the details

Christensen is one of the unsung technical masters of the silent era. Born in Denmark in 1879, he had a varied career before he entered the Danish film industry as an actor and writer in 1912. His early films have a visual sophistication that has invited comparisons to D.W. Griffith and other renowned innovators.

In Häxan, Christensen's dense atmosphere of gloomy superstition is bolstered by an expert use of light and shadow. Silhouette, tableau, and framing are often used for stark theatrical effect. This mastery of lighting effects, combined with beautiful — some might say painterly — compositions, found expression in Richard Louw's remarkable scenery and the photography by Johan Ankerstjerne, Svensk Filmindustri's chief cinematographer. In its day, Häxan was notorious within the Swedish film world for its abundant use of close-ups, then considered improper because the technique blew up the human face in all its raw nakedness to unnatural proportions.

To modern eyes, the special effects are crude but no less effective for it. The demons are masterworks of design and makeup effects. The massive, tongue-wagging Satan — played by Christensen himself — is a realistic depiction of medieval imagery, masculine and lustful and obscene. A skeletal horse walking through a demonic bacchanal is clearly an old-fashioned panto technique, but it's damn creepy all the same. A miniature stop-motion demon clawing through a door remains a startling sight, the camera dispassionately observing its work as if we're watching a documentary on termites.

As an early exercise in near-surrealism, atmosphere, and imaginative techniques, Häxan's influence on 20th century filmmakers, notably Luis Buñuel and Val Lewton, should not be underestimated.

After Häxan, Christensen's reputation rested mainly on his (note the title) Seven Footprints to Satan (1929), an American-made satire of — get this — Hollywood musicals.

William S. Burroughs and Witchcraft Through the Ages

The best-known incarnation of Häxan is the shortened re-edit titled Witchcraft Through the Ages and narrated by William S. Burroughs, of The Naked Lunch fame. This 1968 release was prepared by British filmmaker and distributor Antony Balch, who had previously worked with Burroughs in making a number of short films. Percussionist Daniel Humair wrote the chaotic '60s-bop score. The jazz combo features, among others, Jean-Luc Ponty on violin.

Burroughs' voice opens Witchcraft Through the Ages with a droning incantation against a black screen. His one-note monotone sets the style for the remainder of his narration, which consists primarily of English translations of the original intertitle cards. (The few intertitles that remain are in an English translation.) It says something about the power of silent cinema that Burroughs' narration adds nothing to the goings-on unfolding on the screen. Indeed, it detracts from the full scope of Christensen's work

Still, it's a memorable curiosity that remains evocative of the 1960s and an era of experiments in expression. The score fits the imagery quite well, though it may come across as harsh or abrasive to modern ears.

Witchcraft Through the Ages clocks in at an hour and 16 minutes, compared to Häxan's hour and 45. Possibly still popular on college campuses, Witchcraft Through the Ages might just be best viewed through a haze of sweetly scented smoke.

About the Criterion DVD

Criterion's disc presents the Swedish Film Institute's restoration of Häxan, which began with the creation of a fine-grain master from the original camera negative. The intertitles, most of which had been lost, were replaced with new film titles. They're presented here in the original Swedish with optional English subtitles.

Then the SFI recreated the tinting that had originally been present in theatrical prints of Häxan, bringing this version much closer to what audiences might have seen at the time of its original release.

Naturally some defects in the film stock remain. Expect minor speckling and a little wavery framing on the left-hand side. Nonetheless, this print is superb. Detail and depth are remarkably crisp. The black levels — vital in this film — are solid and true. The tinting tones, chiefly dark blues and ambers, enhance the visuals without appearing oversaturated.

In a word, it looks great.

The musical score

Silent films were seldom watched in actual silence. Huge cinema "palaces" often featured chamber orchestras. For this Criterion Collection release, film music specialist Gillian Anderson attempted to recreate the music played at Häxan's Danish premiere on November 7, 1922. She based the score on a list of musical cues printed in the theater's weekly program notes and conducted an 11-piece ensemble from the Czech Film Orchestra in Prague in June 2001.

A menu item called The Häxan Score provides notes on the score plus a playlist of the 18 titles used to recreate the original music. Familiar titles include segments from Schubert's Unfinished Symphony and Rosamunde Overture, Wagner's Tannhauser, Mozart's Titus Overture, Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, and Ave Maria. For a nifty feature, click the music title to jump to the segment in Häxan that features the music selected.

The score is available in Dolby Digital 5.0 and Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo. Clean, solid, and free of distortion, both options sound fine.

Witchcraft Through the Ages is also presented in its original theatrical aspect ratio of 1.33:1 and likewise was derived from a 35mm fine-grain master. It's untinted and displays a great deal more wear than the restoration of Häxan. But it looks and sounds fine. Its Jean-Luc Ponty soundtrack is available only in Dolby 1.0.

The supporting supplements

The scene-specific audio commentary track is provided by Danish silent film scholar Casper Tybjerg. Erudite and with an encyclopedic knowledge of things Christensen, Tybjerg may not be the most riveting audio-track scholar (Dr. Mabuse's David Kalat having set a gold standard), but he keeps his commentary moving forward and doesn't permit the great gaps of dead air that dog the commentaries of some other "historical" discs. He has a pleasing voice and does a thorough job of fleshing out the context of Christensen's work, illuminating the production itself, and detailing the sources that Häxan was built from. Among other worthwhile moments, Tybjerg soundly refutes the common figure (used in Häxan) of eight million women put to death during the era of the witch hunts. Explaining where that figure originated, Tybjerg gives us a more accurate figure of some 40-50 thousand women murdered — still a ghastly sum by any measure.

In 1941, Christensen filmed an eight-minute Director's Introduction for a re-release of Häxan. It's offered here in Swedish with English subtitles. Addressing his audience on a small set that looks more like a doctor's office than a movie studio, Christensen notes that even in our era of sound technology adding a vocal track to Häxan would diminish its effect. He then offers a preamble for things to come with the intellectual objectivity of a genial scientist introducing a biology lecture. One of the highlights of this segment is a plausible theory behind the common witches' trope of flight through the air.

Bibliothèque Diablolique provides an annotated click-through tour of the centuries-old woodcuts, church wall paintings, and other illustrations Christensen used in "Chapter 1: Sources." The illustrations and commentary occupy roughly 115 frames, including an extensive bibliography by Casper Tybjerg. Fans of The Exorcist will recognize the ancient Near East statue of a winged demon seen in that movie.

A click-through stills gallery contains 40 photographs from the sets and production of Häxan.

A four-and-a-half minute collection of Outtakes gives up footage from a reel of test shots that include pre-production footage from the convent set, rehearsal close-ups of an actress playing a nun "trying out a variety of ungodly titters," and test shots for the scenes of witches in flight — with Christensen himself playing the flying witch.

Finally, the keep-case's pull-out liner notes booklet (reproduced at Criterion's site) is a handy compendium of facts and commentary by Chris Fujiwara, who writes on film for Hermenaut, The Boston Phoenix and other publications. He details Häxan's history and influence in a casual yet scholarly manner. The booklet also includes two pages of insight into the music of Häxan, prepared by Gillian Anderson.

Nightmares before Christmas

Whether as a unique feature of your annual Halloween video fest, or as an addition to the growing collection of silent classic restorations becoming available on DVD, or if your aim is to induce a lifetime of nightmares in small children, this is the disc you're looking for. As an exegesis on the damaging effects of superstition and religious distortion used as a pretext for harming others — sadly, a sickness still prevalent throughout the world today — it makes a fine companion to Carl Sagan's excellent treatise on pernicious fantasies both ancient and modern, The Demon-Haunted World. And as another example of the work that The Criterion Collection is doing for us cinephiles, this restoration of a remarkable work by a filmmaker who deserves greater name recognition gives, you might say, the Devil his due. (All apologies to Peter Cook.)

Music: Susannah McCorkle
Near at hand: The Film Director's Intuition by Judith Weston

Petulia (1968) — Uncommon

In this Mostly Movies blog titled Open the Pod Bay Doors, HAL, it may be odd that I haven't actually written a post about 2001: A Space Odyssey. Chances are that I won't as I've done so elsewhere and, really, I can't improve on what's already been said by deeper thinkers about it over the past 43 years.

But I do occasionally use it as a reference point when talking about other films, and I'm about to do so again with another title from 1968 (my fourth after The Lion in Winter, The Party, and I Love You, Alice B. Toklas). Because if he hadn't been making 2001 at the time, you might reasonably wonder if Petulia had come from the hand and head of Stanley Kubrick. Possibly in collaboration with Kurt Vonnegut.

I mean, you can't miss Petulia's chilly dissection of relationships in the dehumanized final third of the 20th century. Or its acidly comedic observations on the ubiquity of mechanization, violence, and the sterility of our environments. Or its dreamlike probing of the inability of human beings — even husbands, wives and lovers — to connect through physical, social, or emotional walls. Or the technical virtuosity of its striking cinematography and editing. Hell, Petulia does a better job of being Eyes Wide Shut than Eyes Wide Shut did.

Instead, this stabbingly fractured, moodily pitched romantic tragedy about two would-be lovers (Julie Christie and George C. Scott) is from British new-waver Richard Lester. It's his best besides A Hard Day's Night, although the two could not be more different in content, tone, style, and pop purpose. It's arguably his most artful film. That may be because Petulia looks like an even three-way collaboration between Lester, his cinematographer Nicolas Roeg, and editor Antony Gibbs, all three pushing the boundaries of their craft to make Petulia distinctively, almost aggressively other.

It's also a film that's been alarmingly lost in our overflowing late-'60s cultural closet. Petulia is one of the key era-defining films of '68, a DNA-sequencing of the local zeitgeist that can stand tall alongside not only 2001 but also Faces, If..., Once Upon a Time in the West, Rosemary's Baby, The Producers, Bullitt, The Lion in Winter, Planet of the Apes, and Yellow Submarine (with which it would make an interesting push-me/pull-you double feature). In 1978 a Take One magazine poll of 20 film critics — including Vincent Canby, Richard Corliss, Stanley Kauffman, Janet Maslin, Frank Rich, Andrew Sarris, Richard Schickel, David Thomson, and François Truffaut — ranked Petulia among the best American films of the previous decade, taking third place after The Godfather (I and II) and Nashville, and ahead of Annie Hall, Mean Streets and 2001.

And yet, while it hasn't fully dropped down the memory hole, you can just see its manicured fingers clinging to the rim. Petulia had been scheduled to compete at the 1968 Cannes festival, where it undoubtedly would have received high-profile marquee attention. But that May's historic mass riots and wildcat strikes in Paris forced the festival's cancellation. We can only guess how film history would have treated this underappreciated entry had it received the full Cannes exposure treatment.

Petulia is a cutting and conspicuously non-sentimental portrait of its era. It's an anti-The Graduate that provokes by not buying into the American myths we hold about ourselves or (almost uniquely) by not playing to trite sentiments of the time. It's an essential film from and about America in the dying days of "the Sixties," yet the modernism of its style and ambitions makes Petulia impressively ahead of its time.

With this jaded satire of our shifting social values set against the psychedelic Summer of Love scene in San Francisco (locations), with Vietnam battlefield newscasts providing televised wallpaper that everyone chooses to ignore, the film crystallized Lester's growing misanthropic view of a society cracked by its neuroses and alienation.

At the same time, Petulia's recognizably Roegian imagery, shattered-time narrative, and themes of despair and casual brutality anticipate Roeg's later celebrated work such as Don't Look Now (with Christie) and Bad Timing.



If you lay out Petulia's non-linear plot in a straight line, you get a conventional melodrama about middle-aged, almost-maybe-divorced surgeon Archie Bollen (Scott in one of his great performances) embarking on an affair with the beautiful self-proclaimed "kook" Petulia (Christie, ditto and looking fab doing it). The consequences arise when her wealthy and hair-trigger abusive prettyboy husband (Richard Chamberlain in a rare bad-guy role) finds out about it.

Simple enough. But the film takes that story and smashes it with a hammer.

As the trailer's portentous narration points out, Petulia's kaleidoscopic story "starts in the middle," then it "moves towards its end and its beginning at the same time." It does so via flashbacks and flash-forwards, some as quick and sharp as slivers of glass.

At its start we meet Archie and Petulia encountering each other for the first time (or is it?) at a charity dance, "Shake for Highway Safety." The dance band for all those pearled matrons and tuxedoed swells is Janis Joplin with Big Brother and the Holding Company, backed by psychedelic projected oil light shows. (The Grateful Dead also appear in the film, both musically and as cameo hippies.) The contrast is startling and wryly funny. It's the first of many contrasts Lester sets up to illustrate, as Dave Kehr put it, "a world fatally fragmented into rich and poor, past and present, compassion and indifference."

Lester's funny-sad, Vonnegut-like touches depict an America so at odds with itself that two people can't drive to a hotel for an affair without encountering roboticized, automatic "service" at every step. (If Lester were making the movie today, there'd be scenes underscoring with cold-steel irony our generation's search for personal connections via laptop screens and Facebook and Twitter.)

Petulia surprises Archie by installing a portable greenhouse in his San Francisco apartment, "a little bit of life in all this steel and glass." We're the only ones who notice that the greenhouse is itself a stronghold of steel and glass. Although 40ish Archie is beguiled by 20-something Petulia's behavior, he makes a show of brushing it off with a shrug and a quip, "It's the Pepsi generation," defining her character with a TV commercial jingle.

At one point Archie confesses to a friend, "What do I want? To feel something." It's such moments that should make me wince at the film's tendency toward thesis-statement screenwriting and its characters' expository self-awareness, but they fit the film's pitch and tone so well that it doesn't bother me here.

Meanwhile, Petulia wants to be Holly Golightly in all her flip rebelliousness, but she's too bruised by her own melancholy and twisted hell of a marriage to make going lightly anything more than a mod affectation. Her "kookiness" — as Archie puts it, "All this I Love Lucy jazz, it's only cute for a while" — is hardly even that, just a few pranks (the tuba being the most outlandish) and a cheeky attitude that appear put on like her diamond earrings rather than a natural impudent expressiveness. Her facade as Archie's Manic Pixie Dream Girl is another mask and pretense in a world where masks and pretenses, screens and barriers are everywhere and everyone. Scratch her surface and Petulia is a wrenchingly heartbreaking character, a woman aching to be rescued but unable to grasp a lifeline even if one's offered to her.

Lester makes it clear that even when the opportunity presents itself, feeling something is too hard or uncertain a path for most of us to take. Freedom may be just another word for nothing left to lose, but Lester shows via Archie's trip with his sons to a heavily allegorized Alcatraz — then again with Petulia in the film's final, devastating moments — that for some lost souls freedom means the single choice of remaining in the prison we've made for ourselves.

Although set in the Haight-Ashbury scene, its point of view doesn't cut the hippies any more slack than anyone else. Here they're as self-absorbed as the materialist society they have nominally dropped out of.

None of which is to say that Petulia is only a pessimistic drag. It's alluring and seductive, from the smart screenplay (by Barbara Turner and Lawrence B. Marcus, from a novel by John Haase) to Nic Roeg's visuals to John Barry's doleful sax-heavy score, to the on-target performances from its leads, especially the subdued dynamics between magnetic Christie and tightly bound Scott.

Also splendid here are Shirley Knight as Scott's ex-wife, Arthur Hill as Archie's friend Barney, and Joseph Cotten as Chamberlain's enabling, banally despicable father. Look for Rene Auberjonois and, uncredited, Howard Hesseman and Austin Pendleton.

Petulia defies simplistic categorization, and is such a rich and stratified experience, with so much of its substance tucked between the lines, that it deserves and benefits from repeat viewings. Its characters and their motives are open to interpretation and re-interpretation.

So there's no question Petulia is a conversation-starter.

You get a sense of that by reading the reviews from the period. To Time magazine's Richard Schickel, this "terrific movie" is "at once a sad and savage comment on the ways we waste our time, our money and ourselves in upper-middle-class America. It is a subject much trifled with in movies these days, but rarely — if ever — has it been tackled with the ferocious and ultimately purifying energy displayed in this highly moral, yet unmoralistic film." On the other hand, Pauline Kael, in her famous lengthy essay Trash, Art, and the Movies, utterly loathed it. "I have rarely seen a more disagreeable, a more dislikable (or a bloodier) movie than Petulia," she says before going into considerable length explaining why. This movie about our dearth of passion sure does inspire it in others.

More recently, Steven Soderbergh names Petulia as a seminal influence on his work.

If you choose to taste Petulia on DVD, Warner Home Video's 2006 disc offers a few extras that provide some useful background and context. The two "making of" pieces don't tell us more than surface-level insights, but they're worth a look. The newer one is "The Uncommon Making of Petulia" (14 min.), a thin production retrospective with producer Raymond Wagner and Richard Chamberlain. That's where we discover that George C. Scott couldn't get a handle on what the film was about, but he trusted Lester with it.

Next is the vintage piece shot on-set, "Petulia: The Uncommon Movie" (12 min.) that tries too hard to sell the film to the hip set — "If you're like most and get 'with it' pretty quickly, you will have a lot to talk about afterwards" — but it's worthwhile for the behind-the-scenes footage and input from Lester and Scott. Also here is that pompous, overreaching original theatrical trailer that again makes it clear Warner Bros. didn't know what to do with such an "uncommon movie."

Music: KEXP.org
Near at hand: Shadows on the Globe, opening scene experiment

I Love You, Alice B. Toklas (1968) — Making a hash of it

Here's the second in a brief survey of Peter Sellers films I revisited while recently laid up with the flu. Sticking with a chronological order here, this one follows The Party by six months, opening in October 1968.

For Sellers fans interested in score-keeping the up-and-down work during his late-'60s blue period, I Love You, Alice B. Toklas isn't as charming or pleasant as The Party. On the other hand, it's not as smugly charmless as The Magic Christian ('69) or as dreary as Hoffman ('70), both of which I'll get to next.

This movie is, in fact, hardly there at all. As in The Bobo ('67) or There's a Girl in My Soup ('70), Sellers stars in a romantic comedy that's as insubstantial as smoke. Sweetly scented, legally questionable smoke in this case, but that's where its one overarching joke comes from.

As the insufferably cutesy trailer below suggests, for a movie that takes its title from the Haight-Ashbury scene's recipe for marijuana brownies, ILYABT doesn't aim to be anything near a "counterculture" experience. Rather, it's conventional and derivative and middlebrow enough to fall back on broad stereotypes of what audiences in Omaha thought of the "hippie movement." For Sellers completists and fans of that Sgt. Pepper-by-way-of-The Monkees vibe, I Love You, Alice B. Toklas is a quaint watch-it-once experience.



Sellers plays Harold Fine, an L.A. lawyer and 9-to-5 square. Harold lives his bourgeois, buttoned-down, asthmatic life by unenthusiastically going through the motions. That includes a loveless sex life with his secretary/fiancée (Joyce Van Patten) who desires nothing more than a wedding. Strained TV sitcom circumstances put Harold behind the wheel of a "psychedelic" station wagon and in the company of his brother Herbie (David Arkin), a hippie who freaks out the squares at a Jewish funeral by arriving in traditional Hopi burial paint and feathers.

This is the stronger, funnier half of the movie, with Sellers — a sui generis performer no matter the material — again nailing a character at odds with the world around him.

But when he meets lovely Venice Beach hippie chick Nancy (Leigh Taylor-Young), Harold and the movie both spin off into less engaging directions. Not that Taylor-Young is at any fault. On the contrary, she's delightful, not to mention a leggy beauty in that fringed miniskirt revealing the butterfly tattoo positioned enticingly there. (She earned a Golden Globe nomination for "Best Newcomer.")

It's just that when free-spirit Nancy draws out Harold's repressed grooviness in bed and elsewhere, he tunes in and drops out, kicks off his inhibitions along with his Florsheim wingtips, exchanges his suit and tie for love beads and tie-dye, and grows his hair to his shoulders within the span of one jump cut.

Yes, he's dropping his outer squaresville facade to free his inner vibes, and probably getting the best sex of his life in the bargain, so more power to him, I say. Presumably we're intended to groove along with him vicariously, empathizing perhaps with the wish-fulfillment fantasy of this middle-aged neo-hippie's escape from the Establishment's constricting, uptight enforced propriety.

If only. As set up and played out here, way too early in the film Harold's transformation ultimately strikes us less as far-out liberation than as a pathetic, occasionally embarrassing nervous breakdown.

"I've got pot, I've got acid, I've got LSD cubes," he kvetches when Nancy starts questioning his dedication to his newfound hippitude. "I'm probably the hippest guy around here. I'm so hip, it hurts!"

And he's right, it does.

The screenplay by Larry Tucker and Paul Mazursky (agreeably directed by TV veteran Hy Averback) delivers some humorous moments; for instance, the pipe-smoking Man In The Gray Flannel Suit buying a swinging minidress for himself.

Too often, though, it leans on trite comedy traditions by trucking in stereotypes across the board — Harold's "oy vey!" Jewish mother (Jo Van Fleet) and her cronies; the family of 11 Mexicans squeezed into one car and claiming identical neckbrace injuries; the easy conventions of portraying flower-child hippiedom; Van Patten's grating one-note role (she does her best, considering); the older generation stifled by not being "with it"....

Even in '68 there must have been little that was challenging or illuminating here, and with the Summer of Love long done and gone the movie probably felt retro the day it premiered. It opened just two months after the riot-rocked 1968 Democratic Convention, so I wonder if the national mood, post-"Chicago Seven," was an additional downer in the face of such an innocuous little comedy. If Abbie Hoffman ever saw it, I bet he could tell that its director was at the same time delivering The Flying Nun to his television.

It can go without saying that the film hasn't aged well since. Its best-remembered scene, in which pre-hip Harold accidentally serves his parents a batch of Nancy's pot brownies, has lost any comedic currency in our age of That '70s Show in perpetual reruns.

Nonetheless, I Love You, Alice B. Toklas is just guilelessly entertaining enough to be worth a look. Despite the rote banalities at its edges, at its center Sellers gives his all to the material, and Leigh Taylor-Young is as appealing as a fresh-plucked peach.

Moreover, and critically important in my book, the movie comes with a gentle soul. It gives the era's youth counterculture a sympathetic, even affectionate shake. Although the hippies are portrayed with elementary sitcom strokes, ILYABT doesn't condescend or propagandize by casting them as conservative-cliché "dirty freaks" or agitprop no-goodniks. They're just good-hearted, decent folks trying their best to find their own way in the world, just like the rest of us. Similarly, mainstream society is not held up as either a faultless model lifestyle or some monolithic enemy that only Timothy Leary's flower-power acolytes can redeem.

This nonpartisan middle-of-the-road approach almost pays off in the final scenes, when Harold groks the hollowness of both hippiedom's excesses and the Establishment's straitjacketing conformity. This drives a fadeout that's a flat-footed steal from The Graduate, but it was probably a sincere one.

In Elmer Bernstein's perfunctory score we recognize glimpses of the maestro's signature orchestration amid the sitar patchouli oil; however, let's assume that the twee theme song by Harpers Bizarre, which incessantly repeats the movie's title like the mantra of an Up With People show choir, is not Mr. Bernstein's fault.

On Leigh Taylor-Young's web site, worth a look are her pages of photos and reminiscences from her experience of the movie's production.

Music: Joe Sample and Randy Crawford "Feeling Good"
Near at hand: David Delamare's Jabberwocky