Forget Love, How About Like?

There's a good movie buried inside I Love You Alice B. Toklas (1968), but it's not allowed to escape.  I just watched the Peter Sellers comedy for the first time in years, and it doesn't really work.  It's one of those 60s artifacts that tries to deal with the counterculture, but it's too thin and satirical to be very telling.  In fact, the situations are ridiculous throughout, and when you don't buy the plot, the comedy doesn't play.

Sellers gives an odd performance as Harold Fine, a rigid Jewish attorney in Los Angeles.  He's set to marry his long-time girlfriend but gets a whiff of the freedom that flower children offer and turns his back on his old lifestyle.  He soons realizes hippie life isn't much better, and by the end is stuck searching for something else.  It's not a bad concept, but the silly plotting and stereotyped characters, not to mention horrendous direction from Hy Averback (allegedly--see below), prevent much of interest from happening.

And when you get down to it, most of the hippie stuff is a ruse. The drug angle atttracted a lot of attention at the time, but what really turns Sellers on is the lovely Leigh Taylor-Young. (Did in real life, too.) Of course, that's a story as old as the hills.  I guess the hippie wrapping gave it a fresh angle.

The film is interesting as a time capsule.  It may not present hippies as they were, but it at least gives us Hollywood's idea of hippies, and shows a lot of Los Angeles as well.  The screenwriters, Paul Mazursky and Larry Tucker, were fairly hip guys, but hardly part of the scene.  They were major TV writers and this was their big break.  Mazursky was actually set to direct, but Sellers, who was apparently insane, claimed Mazursky slept with his wife.  During the shoot, however, mercurial Sellers would listen to Mazursky's advice on how to play scenes, and Averback (also a TV guy) was smart enough not to get in the way.

The film, if nothing else, was an important stepping stone in Mazursky's career.  Next year, he got his first job as a film director--Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice.  It has a similar theme--the invasion of a new lifestyle--and handles it much better than Toklas.