Word: caroled
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...that simple. The conflict in this movie isn't that simple because Bob and Carol are hip (?) and Ted and Alice are square (!) Right?! Of course, right. From the very beginning. in that Hollywood fashion we all love and adore, writer-producer Tucker and writer-director Mazursky have stacked the cards against Bob and Carol. They do this by making Bob and Carol not so much liberated as pseudo-liberated. Bob and Carol think they are hip, but as the audience happily discovers, they are actually phonies and assholes. Robert Culp is a middle-aged Peter Fonda who wears beads...
...lovable squares. They have your sympathies from the outset-not only by default, but because they really are swell people. They want to be able to smoke pot without coughing; they want to believe in Esalen; they want to dig wife-swapping. If they rather than Bob and Carol, had gone to Esalen, they might even have been saved...
With Bob and Carol as their spiritual advisers, however, it is only natural that they should end up with their middle-class values intact. The only possibility Tucker and Maszurky give Ted and Alice to consider is Southern California's Rolls-Royce variety of bohemia. And for that reason, the movie is a cop-out; the supposed Bob and Carol versus Ted and Alice conflict does not exist as Bob and Carol are paper tigers; it is all, so to speak, philosophically shitty...
...RIGHTS, then, we should hate Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice. But consider: Ted and Alice are the most convincing married couple to appear in a Hollywood film for a long time. As played by Gould and Cannon, they are funny and sometimes touching and always appealing. Even if Hollywood still has to sell-out when it presents revolutionaries, it has at least learned to give us human straight guys...
Consider, then, Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice. It is a movie that is at once hateful and likable, controversial and mundane, fascinating and stupid. Should you waste your time with this sort of thing...