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The Criterion Channel Presents: Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969)


Probably one of the most important movies of the 1960s sexual revolution is Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice. Coming out the same year as Andy Warhol’s seminal erotic film Blue Movie, Paul Mazursky’s feature directing debut was a slightly more conventionally tasteful alternative to that explicit art piece. However it still dealt in ideas unthinkable in Hollywood only a decade before. It’s about a well-off Los Angeles couple Bob (Robert Culp) and Carol Sanders (Natalie Wood), who return from a relationship therapy retreat with more open and experimental ideas regarding sex and marriage, and their conservative friends Ted (Elliott Gould) and Alice Henderson (Dyan Cannon) reacting to this. Boasting a sharp script and strong characters, the film epitomizes (albeit a bit late) the 60’s ideologies of free love and sexual openness, as it explores first Bob and then Carol’s infidelities, and Ted and Alice’s initial distaste but growing curiosity for their friends’ new lifestyle. Such betrayals are justified as harmless in the former couples’ eyes through their belief in and the films’ major theme on the distinction between love and sex -something that Mazursky isn’t quite as sure about as his characters, given how the climactic scene plays out, when Ted and Alice finally are seduced over to their friends’ side and participate in the movies’ famous partner-swapping foursome. 
Yet there is still a kind of idealization of sexual liberation in the implicit revitalizing power it has on both relationships, and the parade of couples (many of whom are mixed race and ages, and even a couple homosexual) who illustrate the final moments. Gould and Cannon are the movies’ lifeblood, acting as the films’ conscious avatars for a large portion of its audience -needing to be if not convinced, at least made to understand as much as most non-hippie viewers, the taboo practices of their counterparts. The movie gets by on some good humour as well, from the awkward Ted and Alice being somewhat uncomfortable in Bob and Carol’s newfound closeness to each other (and them), to Bob having a civil and friendly conversation with the frightened tennis instructor Carol had just slept with. But most of all given its purpose, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice is sexy. I’m not going to deny the sexual appeal of Wood or Cannon, and though I don’t swing that way I can fathom an attractiveness to Culp or Gould (provided 1960’s body hair isn’t a turn-off). These are attractive people in a movie about sex at a significant juncture in the culture around it, and they aren’t afraid to show off and discuss sexuality. Regardless of your opinions of the ideas depicted, it was a bold film then and still a bold film now.

Criterion Recommendation: The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
The twenty-fifth anniversary of this American masterpiece is as good a time as any to induct it into the Criterion Collection. The Shawshank Redemption is for my money one of the greatest movies ever made; a beautiful film about endurance, friendship, and hope as it chronicles the twenty year incarceration of an innocent man in a corrupt Maine penitentiary. Its’ marvellous cinematography, muted aesthetic, and claustrophobic sensibility is matched by an excellence of storytelling and character development most movies can only dream of, and stupendous performances by Tim Robbins, Morgan Freeman, Bob Gunton, and James Whitmore that are respectively entrancing, sombre, frustrating, and heartbreaking. It’s part of an exclusive club of films that never fail to lift my spirits. If you haven’t already, watch it, watch it again, and then watch it a third time, and I defy you to justify why it isn’t included in such a great cinematic canon as Criterion.

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