Customer Reviews

Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice [VHS]

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

In my consumer guide mode, I should first mention one very simple way to tell whether you might like Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice--do you like films that are almost all dialogue? If not, you should stay away from this one, because that's 90 percent of it. It's very poignant and often clever dialogue, but dialogue nonetheless.

A dialogue-laden film can't succeed without grand performances, and we get just that from the four principal actors. I was especially impressed with Elliott Gould, partially because I haven't always liked him in other films.

Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice deals with normal, middle class couples in the late 1960s who are trying to deal with and adapt to cultural spillover from the then-popular hippie movement. Bob (Robert Culp) is a filmmaker who wants to do a documentary on something of a "personal exploration retreat". While initially checking the retreat out, he and wife Carol (Natalie Wood) completely forget about the film and become wrapped up in the personal exploration taking place. When they get back home, they introduce their new approach to life and interpersonal communications to best friends Ted (Gould) and Alice (Dyan Cannon), who think that Bob and Carol have gone a bit looney. They really think that when later Carol suddenly announces that Bob had a brief affair with another woman and they're both happy with it. Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice then becomes primarily an exploration of how average middle class folks deal with attempts to incorporate hippie sexual liberation beliefs into their lives.

It's a great idea, handled with aplomb by writer-director Paul Mazursky and co-writer Larry Tucker. Interestingly, Mazursky revisited the same basic ideas in Scenes from a Mall (1991), which enabled him to show how much popular cultural attitudes had changed between the late 1960s and the early 1990s. Here, the cultural clash between hippies and the middle class allows him to adeptly explore a number of themes, ranging from hippie ideals as a trend to be followed rather than ideals that are believed in for their own sake, to the psychological conflicts of intrinsic desires either against other intrinsic desires or against cultural conditioning and expectations. Mazursky employs an artful restraint so that these themes are only implicit, but they're definitely present.

The ending of the film is highly unusual but effective, although especially for me--as someone who champions extremely liberal sexuality and thinks monogamy isn't really a great idea--there was a contradictory one-two punch of being disheartening, then shortly after uplifting. The effect of the final scene was a bit enigmatically ambiguous. But I don't think that's a bad thing at all.

I see I'm going to have to stand up for this film!

This is an
incredibly insightful look at the sexual revolution, filmed even as
the changes happening in our society were still developing!!!

Two
couples struggle with the concept of fulfillment. Treating their each
and every desire for temporal pleasure as an entitlement, they come
face to face with their personal limits, and the dehumanizing aspects
of hedonism.

The end is more evocotive then Leonard Maltin ... would
have you believe.

All of them have woken up (in the evening) to
their collective morning after. They are in the elevator coming down
from their "trip." They are shellshocked. The music
swells..."what the world needs now is love sweet
love."

Love. The part of the equation they had forgotten to
account for.

They exit the elevator and walk out into the Vegas
night. Peoplo from all over the world have come to the same place,
are struggling with the same issues, trying to find someway of making
contact with each other.

Maybe I'm just an old hippie. Maybe it is
pretentious. I also know it is the film truest to that time and what
happened to that generation.

Capturing the sexual revolution of the late sixties, this comedy presents two married couples, free-thinking and ready (or so they think) for an open marriage Bob (Robert Culp) and Carol (Natalie Wood) and their best friends, a more traditional couple, Ted (Elliot Gould) and Alice (Dyan Cannon). I love the film and I believe that it has aged very well. Its theme and the way it was presented are definitely not dated. Many scenes are hilarious and superbly acted by all four main characters, Gould and Cannon being outstanding. I also believe that 60s was the best dressed decade for women (don't like pirate shirts for men, though :)) and I enjoyed the beauty of the film. It's got real class that is timeless.

Unlike alot of the films rooted in the counterculture of the sixties, "Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice" dates well because essentially it is a film that champions fidelity. How else do you expose the shallow aspects of free love without making a farce of it? Director-writer Paul Mazursky doesn't bludgeon his point home but gently tweaks it. The film is also helped that Bob (Robert Culp) and Carol(Natalie Wood) are fully-fleshed characters and not stereotypical new-agers to be mocked. You may laugh at their foibles but you do not laugh at their characters. The more interesting characters are the staid Ted(Elliott Gould) and Alice(Dyan Cannon) who the audience can probably most identify with. Ted and Alice are conservative Yuppie types who may verbalize horror at their swinging compatriots but subliminally fantasize about their lifestyle. All the principal actors are good here and the laugh quota is extremely high.

"Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice" is an insightful film about the sexual revolution.

It deals with two couples -- one older and into "experimentation" (Bob & Carol), and the other younger and more square (Ted & Alice).

In a sense, the sexual experimentation of Bob and Carol epitomized the 60's ethos of (perhaps pathological) self-reflection and the idea that "if it feels good, do it." (We're still feeling the reverberations of that.)

But the ending of this enjoyably funny movie also indicates that most people can only go so far. Whether its cultural conditioning or innate, there are certain lines that most people simply cannot cross....

The movie does not pass judgment, but ultimately, there is a message there.

All the actors are good, but Elliot Gould and Dyan Cannon especially so. (They were both nominated for supporting Oscars.) Dyan Cannon is wonderful -- she's the best thing about the movie.

I was delighted to see this film is still available. It is a minor classic of the late 60s and beautifully captures the narcissism of Southern California, then as now. One of Natalie Wood's best late-career performances. Bob Culp was super-cool in his post-I Spy film heyday.

It's tempting to call this archetypical 1969 comedy severely dated, but that would be too superficial a judgment. Taken as a period piece when the sexual revolution was completely redefining the country's moral code, the film is a shrewdly observed, sharply comic character study among the Southern California bourgeoisie. It also marks the auspicious directorial debut of Paul Mazursky, a former actor who ended up making two decades' worth of insightful films focused on personal foibles and sympathetic satire (An Unmarried Woman, Down and Out in Beverly Hills). He cleverly uses the "Hallelujah" chorus of Handel's Messiah to open the film as documentary filmmaker Bob Sanders and his wife Carol drive through the canyons outside LA to an Esalen-like couples' retreat where narcissism runs rampant with participants encouraged to express how they "feel" through group hugs, crying, mutual staring, even pillow punching.

The experience transforms Bob and Carol into a touchy-feely couple so intent on being completely honest with each other that they accept each other's acts of adultery. This level of supposed enlightenment initially appalls their best friends, Ted and Alice Henderson, who hold on tenuously to their more traditional values. However, a weekend in Vegas becomes a cathartic showdown among the two couples, and the outrageous brashness of their liberated behavior comes to a crescendo that manages to be unexpected and predictable at the same time. Mazursky ends things on a surreal note with Jackie DeShannon's classic rendition of Burt Bacharach and Hal David's What the World Needs Now Is Love. Through it all, the four principal actors give sharp performances that wisely leave the motivations for their characters ambiguous enough for the audience to draw their own conclusions.

Coming off his hit TV series I Spy, Robert Culp effectively plays Bob as a hippie-wannabe closing in on middle age and recognizing an innate need to give in to the new moral order to belong. As Carol, Natalie Wood at thirty never looked so sexy nor came across so relaxed onscreen. She brings such an alluring knowingness to the role that it becomes difficult to believe why Bob would want to cheat on her in the first place. In his first major role, Elliott Gould makes Ted an amusing, sympathetic figure who keeps dancing between disgust and envy with increasing alacrity. Dyan Cannon comes closest to stealing the picture since she carries the biggest character arc as Alice. The scene with her psychiatrist is extremely well played. It is her character who does the abrupt about-face that spurs the climax (...you should pardon the expression). The 2004 DVD contains a sometimes entertaining, sometimes too self-conscious commentary track featuring Mazursky, Culp, Gould, and Cannon, as well as a twenty-minute interview with Mazursky from 2003.

Let's do the Time Warp!
One of the iconic movies of the 1970's, "Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice" is another view of the sexual revolution. Even if you only know Robert Culp as Debra's father on "Everyone Loves Raymond" and never heard of Dyan Cannon or Natalie Wood, you'll still enjoy this send up of pop psychology and pseudo-honesty.
Is it dated? Clothes and language, yes but some concepts still hold true.
Spoiler alert: If you're morally offended by the concept of adultery, you may not enjoy some the action as much as the underlying message. Marriage and fidelity gets the same treatment here as in "Same Time Next Year"

If you have not seen the movie Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice..........drop everything you are doing and take the time to see it ! Be prepared to laugh until your stomach aches ! I must admit that the type of humor is, well, different to say the least. It is extremely dry and if you do not have any knowledge of lifestyles in the 70's, you may be a little "in the fog" on this one. But give it a try ! It is worth the time ! I consider it a classic in my personal collection. :)