Petulia (1968)
Petulia (1968)
Directed by Richard Lester
There's a strange distance between me and movies from the 1960s, a decade which ended when I was thirteen years old and living in a small town in the Midwest. It had one movie theater, where as children we went on Saturday mornings for a program of cartoons. The manager, a sharp-voiced old shrew, would try to quiet the crowd of 300 kids by clapping her hands and screeching "All right! All right, now!" as you would scold a noisome pack of dogs. We saw current movies there too, things we were allowed to see like "The Sound of Music" and "Mary Poppins," or westerns.
There were also what we referred to as "war movies," which were all about World War II, as those who had fought the war reached middle age -- the age of our parents -- and enthusiastically consumed sanitized re-enactments of war, like "PT-109" and “What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?” Following is a real dialogue between me and one of my friends:
Him: Want to go to the movie?
Me: What's playing?
Him A war movie.
Me: OK.
It turned out to be "South Pacific." “There is Nothin’' Like a Dame” and “Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair” were pretty great, to our child eyes, but by the time we got to "Bali Hai" it was clear something strange was going on.
Julie Christie and George C. Scott in “Petulia”
But I certainly wouldn't have been allowed to see a movie with an adult theme, like "Suddenly, Last Summer" "Picnic," "Valley of the Dolls," or "Petulia" — any movie with an only slightly adult theme. They weren't even spoken of; my parents considered such things trash, and never went to see them either. I was vaguely aware they existed, and like other cultural icons of their generation -- the scandalous lifestyle of Frank Sinatra, anything remotely based in psychology like the work of Tennessee Williams, the suicides of Ernest Hemingway and Marilyn Monroe -- they were considered taboo. At the time, I wondered just what was so scandalous.
But even later, I never went to see any of those movies, and now that I can replay them on a streaming service, for research or merely out of morbid curiosity, I'm glad I didn't waste my time. Because they are trash.
In this film directed by Richard Lester (British), Julie Christie (British) plays a 1960s version of a manic pixie dream girl, full of neuroses, in San Francisco. The first scene is a charity ball of some kind, with a psychedelic rock band (yes, that's Janis Joplin and her band Big Brother and the Holding Company) instead of an orchestra, but with the exact overdressed and miserable middle aged couples you'd expect when you hear the words "charity ball." She ghosts her husband, a very wooden Richard Chamberlain, to go off to fuck George C. Scott, who is at the ball as one of its sponsors. But they don't have sex, because of all her neuroses. This was to be expected in the 1960s.
Despite the British director, it is a lovely travelogue of late 60s San Francisco. You get Fort Point, Muir Woods, Alcatraz, Golden Gate Park, Nob Hill, even the famous rows of “ticky tacky” houses on the Daly City border. And hippies!
There's a story of some kind; it goes on; I didn't believe it for a minute, or the dialogue. I think the main point of the movie was to show swingin' outfits modeled by Christie, and to keep alive the titilating suggestion, never fulfilled, that she will appear unclothed in a sex scene.
Scott is, as always, choleric, ready to explode. To meet the requirements of a romantic leading man, he's almost slender, he's almost handsome, but one must remember that in "Dr. Strangelove," filmed eight years prior, he already appeared to be in his 50s, and that’s his natural state. (Speaking of outfits, to make him appear more like the swinging bachelor his character is supposed to be, in one scene he wears an orange-red turtleneck sweater under a white jacket that's supposed to be hip. A catastrophe.)
This movie depicts women as either nice mothers, neurotic sexpots, or nuns who are incompetent nurses. The men are rage-filled, for no reason that's ever explained; some 55-odd years later, we can, of course, understand this as anxiety about how women were becoming liberated. There's a telling monologue about two-thirds through, after Petulia has been savagely beaten by her husband. Says Joseph Cotton, playing her father: "It's been a terrible shock to Mother and me: Our sailor boy and his pretty bride. As I said to Mother: 'The values we live by just don't seem to amount to anything at all anymore. Our kids can chuck out 2000 years of Western civilization, of Christianity, just as though it wasn't worth a red cent.'"
He's speaking not of any actual ethical or religious stricture, but of the middle-class expectation that you don't beat your wife badly enough to put her in the hospital. Now we can read his monologue as an unintentional statement of the anxiety of men in the face of the sexual revolution.
The novel by John Haase ("an American dentist and author whose most well-known novel was adapted into the 1968 film 'Petulia'," according to Wikipedia) must have been even worse -- its original title was "Me and the Arch Kook Petulia."