After a weekend of emotionally charged encounter sessions at an Esalen- like retreat known as "The Institute," L.A.-based documentary filmmaker Bob Sanders (Robert Culp) and his wife Carol (Natalie Wood) become zealous acolytes of the late-Sixties, hippie-inspired cult of expressive individualism: an apolitical ideology of bourgeois hedonism that sanctifies joyful spontaneity, uninhibited candor, and guilt-free (extramarital) sex as the sine qua non of a fulfilling life. Adhering to the new openness, Bob confesses to Carol that he has had a "just physical" one-night stand with a 20-year-old blonde while on a business trip to San Francisco. Though seemingly sanguine about the news, Carol proceeds to have her own dalliance with Horst (Horst Ebersberg), her handsome tennis instructor, but is caught in the act when Bob comes home early from a trip to New York. After a bout with old-fashioned jealousy, Bob seems able to reconcile himself to Carol's infidelity. As for Bob and Carol's best friends—Ted (Elliott Gould) and Alice (Dyan Cannon)—this New Age ethos strikes them as suspiciously naive and self-indulgent until Ted succumbs to his own opportunity to cheat while on a trip to Miami. When he confesses his indiscretion to Alice while the foursome is on vacation in Las Vegas, Alice calls everyone's bluff by stripping down to her underwear and suggesting the two couples have a spouse-swapping orgy in their hotel suite before going to a Tony Bennett concert! Supposedly dutiful swingers all, the four climb into bed and commence foreplay with each other's spouse but come to find that they cannot go through with it; evidently, primal taboos surrounding conjugal intimacy are too strong to overcome. In the somewhat surreal denouement, a chastened Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice march out of their casino hotel, followed by a long string of other hand holding couples and promenade in the parking lot to the lilting strains of Jackie DeShannon singing Bert Bacharach's "What the World Needs Now is Love." The ending, and the movie as a whole, is tonally ambiguous. Are viewers meant to applaud or sneer at the triumph of conventional morality over revolutionary sexual-emotional mores? Probably more the former but the film still manages to raise questions about status quo hypocrisy that it cannot put to bed peacefully. Made for a mere $2 million, 'Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice' was a smash hit, earning $30 million at the box office. A watered-down TV series based on the film lasted only half a season in the autumn of 1973. VHS (1996) and DVD (2004).
Review of Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice
