Los Angeles lawyer Harold Fine (Peter Sellers) is one hash brownie away from a total re-examination of his life. But is he really ready for the consequences of a mid-life freak-out?
Watching "I Love You, Alice B. Toklas" today is to see how the hippie subculture was seen by Middle America back when the Beatles were still together and Woodstock a year or so down the road. Fine doesn't want to upset his Jewish mother (Jo Van Fleet), but those brownies combined with radiant hippie chick Nancy (Leigh Taylor-Young) is too much for him to resist.
One problem with "I Love You, Alice B. Toklas" is that it's really two slapped-together films in one. The first, running an hour, is a well-observed character study, light on laughs but diverting, featuring Harold as prisoner of his middle-class American existence. The second, Harold's hippie freak-out, is a half-hour "Love, American Style" episode utterly at odds with the Harold Fine we have come to know. Sex with Nancy, sure, but are you supposed to believe Harold would be handing out flowers at intersections with just a little help from Duncan Hines? Sellers looks a bit like John Lennon with a long-hair wig, but it isn't enough to convince.
Director Hy Averback worked on several of my favorite "M*A*S*H" episodes, but he's out of his element with this early cinematic treatment of the counterculture. Kids in bad wigs say "groovy" and "far out" in a way that feels as strained as seeing someone shout "Twenty-Three Skidoo" in a 1920s movie or "Friend Me On Facebook" today. Nancy even wants to go to the funeral of a Fine family friend because she thinks death is beautiful. Groovy!
Taylor-Young is part of my problem with this movie. She's beautiful, yes, in that impossible must-be-from-California-or-Sweden way, but she's really put there for sex appeal only, despite setting up an interesting character the film never develops. After she and Harold come to a crisis over her free-love style, she falls by the wayside. Taylor-Young plays her character so wide-eyed and innocent you want more of a resolution of her relationship with Harold. Instead she's left as a go-go-dancing fantasy figure.
To the extent Sellers does shine here, he does so playing off the other characters, particularly Van Fleet and Van Patten, the latter of whom steals what's there of the show as the grasping, aging wanna-be wife. When Harold offers an "area" for when they might be married, she responds: "I know from areas, but I want is a date."
Otherwise, this is a sub-par movie with some fun moments that never really come together, disappointingly so given that there's real potential to see Sellers cut up here. Instead, he plays one of his most buttoned-down characters for an hour, followed by a totally different, wacky guy thereafter. If only Sellers and the writers had done more to connect the dots, "I Love You, Alice B. Toklas" might have been a worthy Sellers comedy.
Watching "I Love You, Alice B. Toklas" today is to see how the hippie subculture was seen by Middle America back when the Beatles were still together and Woodstock a year or so down the road. Fine doesn't want to upset his Jewish mother (Jo Van Fleet), but those brownies combined with radiant hippie chick Nancy (Leigh Taylor-Young) is too much for him to resist.
One problem with "I Love You, Alice B. Toklas" is that it's really two slapped-together films in one. The first, running an hour, is a well-observed character study, light on laughs but diverting, featuring Harold as prisoner of his middle-class American existence. The second, Harold's hippie freak-out, is a half-hour "Love, American Style" episode utterly at odds with the Harold Fine we have come to know. Sex with Nancy, sure, but are you supposed to believe Harold would be handing out flowers at intersections with just a little help from Duncan Hines? Sellers looks a bit like John Lennon with a long-hair wig, but it isn't enough to convince.
Director Hy Averback worked on several of my favorite "M*A*S*H" episodes, but he's out of his element with this early cinematic treatment of the counterculture. Kids in bad wigs say "groovy" and "far out" in a way that feels as strained as seeing someone shout "Twenty-Three Skidoo" in a 1920s movie or "Friend Me On Facebook" today. Nancy even wants to go to the funeral of a Fine family friend because she thinks death is beautiful. Groovy!
Taylor-Young is part of my problem with this movie. She's beautiful, yes, in that impossible must-be-from-California-or-Sweden way, but she's really put there for sex appeal only, despite setting up an interesting character the film never develops. After she and Harold come to a crisis over her free-love style, she falls by the wayside. Taylor-Young plays her character so wide-eyed and innocent you want more of a resolution of her relationship with Harold. Instead she's left as a go-go-dancing fantasy figure.
To the extent Sellers does shine here, he does so playing off the other characters, particularly Van Fleet and Van Patten, the latter of whom steals what's there of the show as the grasping, aging wanna-be wife. When Harold offers an "area" for when they might be married, she responds: "I know from areas, but I want is a date."
Otherwise, this is a sub-par movie with some fun moments that never really come together, disappointingly so given that there's real potential to see Sellers cut up here. Instead, he plays one of his most buttoned-down characters for an hour, followed by a totally different, wacky guy thereafter. If only Sellers and the writers had done more to connect the dots, "I Love You, Alice B. Toklas" might have been a worthy Sellers comedy.