American Film History 1960-1990

‘There might not have been a more awkward period in Hollywood history than the’60s. Social, political and economic forces way beyond the control of studio executives conspired to turn time-honored conventions and archetypes on their head, and the movies evidenced all the topicality of a Civil War re-enactment. There was a time in Hollywood history when the dollars of teenagers were considered less valuable than those of their parents and grandparents.
Blame it on the bossa nova or old habits dying hard, but, no question, the industry was in no hurry to bust headlong into the future. The Production Code may have been on its last legs, but the combined forces of the Legion of Decency, conservative lawmakers and regional censorship boards intimidated distributors and kept mainstream American filmmakers in a deep rut.’ (1)
Handcuffed by the timidity of their employers, America’s best and brightest began to lose ground to directors, screenwriters and actors who enjoyed the freedom to tweak time-honored genres and invent characters that may have lived in the real world. Some held their nose and slogged onward, while such mavericks as John Cassavetes and Arthur Penn looked elsewhere for encouragement. That there was an audience for arthouse titles was proven by the box-office success of films by Bergman, Fellini, Kurosawa, Forman, Godard, and Truffaut. This phenomenon wouldn’t last, of course. The newly established MPAA ratings system would provide a cushion between the studios and Congress, and Americans would soon grow weary of reading subtitles. Still, to paraphrase Bob Dylan, somethin’ was happenin’ but no one in Hollywood knew what it was … did they, Mr. Jones?
While Hollywood remained content to churn out Rat Pack (“Robin and the 7 Hoods”) and Elvis Presley quasi-musicals (“Kissin’ Cousins”), American filmgoers were free to salivate over images of Swinging London in such British imports as “Blow-Up,” “Georgy Girl,” “Alfie,” “What’s New Pussycat,” “Morgan!” and “Darling.” Interesting things were happening, as well, in the Haight-Ashbury, East Village, along the Sunset Strip and on campuses from Berkeley to Boston, you wouldn’t know it from the movies.
Outside of the fledgling indie-, underground- and experimental-film movements, the counterculture scene was chronicled in such goofy exploitation pictures as “The Trip,” “Psych-Out,” “The Love-Ins,” “The Wild Angels” and “Riot on Sunset Strip.” It took even longer for Hollywood to catch up with the increasingly louder anti-Vietnam War protesters, and, when it did, they were depicted as spoiled brats, shaggy juvenile delinquents or aging beatniks.
The studios couldn’t have been more out of touch with the youth of America, no matter if they were currently wearing flowers in their hair, jungle fatigues or baggy swimsuits.
Richard Lester returned to America to employ his flash-and-dash pop sensibility on “Petulia.” In it, George C. Scott played a recently divorced doctor who, to his dismay, finds himself being stalked by a beautiful, if extremely kooky and married socialite, portrayed by a significantly Julie Christie. Their awkward courting dance is set against the backdrop of a San Francisco that’s about to be thrown into upheaval by an invasion of hippies and resulting outbreak of psychedelia, and the militancy of civil rights and anti-war activists.
Scott and Christie run in a much more established and wealthy class of the citizenry, but, as today, San Francisco’s relatively cozy confines ensured that people of all backgrounds and persuasions rubbed shoulders with each other on a daily basis. Christie’s Petulia may have been a total nut job, but her zest to escape the straitjacket of conformity eventually cut through the thick crust of a bedraggled man who only “wants to feel something.” Interspersed with the drama and comedy are snippets of concert footage shot by Nicolas Roeg of Big Brother and the Holding Company and the Grateful Dead, members of whom also appear in street scenes.
Lester infused “Petulia” with some of the same visual kineticism and pop sensibility that informed the Beatles films. Moreover, the picture never stooped to ridicule, exploit or overplay the then-burgeoning hippie scene. Like the tourists, seagulls, snooty upper-crusters and the Golden Gate, cameo appearances by Jerry Garcia, Phil Lesh, Ron “Pigpen” McKernan and Janis Joplin – on and off stage – were organically integrated into the narrative. And, it’s wonderful.
In the 1960's in particular, for obvious socio-political reasons, you got a lot of films waxing nostalgic about the ultimate Non-Conformists bucking "The System" in some kind of deeply-meaningful, even existential, principled stand. It's the idea behind much of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, of course, and Easy Rider and many many many other films. (Even The Trip!)

’Richard Lester's 1968 masterpiece Petulia takes the notion a few steps farther. Initially a lightly-entertaining screwball riff about an uptight recent divorcee (George C. Scott) and a kooky young married woman (Julie Christie) who bond over some half-seen, grim circumstances, the movie eventually descends into a cold, vaguely sinister allegory about artificiality and emotional distance. What begins by celebrating the eccentric Outsider archetype becomes a critique on the very notion of a counter-culture. In a world so far gone, so removed from reality and insulated from experience, Lester can't find room for true freedom. It has been innovated out of existence. There's just a ton going on in this film. Lester's compelling, almost unsettling ideas about modernity and the loss of interconnectedness that goes along with it come at a heady clip. In a move reminiscent in some ways of Robert Altman, Lester fills his sonic canvas with background noise and barely-heard conversations.’ (4)
‘And as you'd expect from a Lester film, each scene is filled with smart little asides and dashes of dark humor that really highlight all these ideas and more that I didn't get to describe. Like the indoor greenhouse Archie receives as a gift, with little light bulbs the installation man says work better than the sun. Oh, and I didn't talk about the borrowed shots from Vertigo, also filmed in San Francisco, and how Lester plays with a lot of Hitchcock's favorite themes in a sidelong, more cynical fashion.’(2)
Petulia got many enthusiastic reviews when first released. It also received some skeptical pans, including a big thumbs-down from the influential Pauline Kael, who called it "come-dressed-as-the-sick-soul-of-America-party" and blamed "the mass media" for hyping Lester too much. Seen today, when its style seems downright tame by Quentin Tarantino standards, the movie is an absorbing character study, a colorful time capsule, and a valuable history lesson. Turns out the Sixties weren't so Swinging after all.
The point of this unconventional approach is not just to dazzle the eyes, but to make sure the story's full meaning comes across. Petulia is sliced and diced because its characters' minds and hearts are sliced and diced, and because the shallow, artificial culture they live in has started to break apart in ways that mirror (and maybe cause) their growing incoherence. Lester's style is of a piece with the psychology and sociology he portrays-charmingly unpredictable one moment, decadent and dangerous the next. Petulia is a wake-up call for the '60s, warning that the decade has fallen under the spell of its own shining surfaces, smiley faces, and self-deluding kookiness. No wonder its characters can't get their inner selves together. They've almost forgotten they have inner selves, and that's perilous for American society, since the story's main figures aren't the hippies and dippies who crowd around the edges of some scenes, but members of the "respectable" ruling class whose escalating instability has wide-ranging consequences. "Petulia" tells the story of two very different people whose lives irrevocably intersect in a vague search for place and self in the 1960s. Lester claims to have shaped "Petulia"'s characters as symbols of 1960s America, and yet rarely has the cinema offered such complex and three-dimensional characters. The title character in particular, played by Julie Christie, is a young "kook" recently married into comfortable wealth, and whose behavior is not only unpredictable, but erratic to the point of schizophrenia. George C. Scott's Archie is a rather serious doctor in the midst of a divorce (he terminated his marriage, he says, because he'd tired of being "a handsome couple") and making a rather forced effort to enjoy new bachelorhood. In the opening scene, Petulia tells Archie, "I've been married six months and I've never had an affair." After much discussion, but no kissing, Archie and Petulia decide, almost out of resignation, to have an affair. What these characters take from each other is a very complicated thing, which I can only describe as brief protection from what seems inevitable loneliness. Certainly they're an interesting pair. Über-critic Pauline Kael describes Julie Christie's portrayal of Petulia as "lewd and anxious, expressive and empty, brilliantly faceted but with something central missing, almost as if there's no woman inside." I couldn't say it better myself. George C. Scott's Archie is a brilliantly understated masculine foil to this Petulia. Richard Combs wrote of him in Film Comment as representative of a type "reduced to inertia, impotence, terminal ambivalence by the fact that they see too clearly and feel too keenly the compromises that society demands."
The Swinging Sixties! If you remember them, an old joke goes, you weren't really there. But if you don't remember them, chances are you weren't born yet. Today's younger generations have taken their image of the period largely from movies, including a few by Richard Lester that helped define the scene while the scene was still happening. Petulia, now available on DVD from Warner Home Video, was one of these. So were the Beatles comedies A Hard Day's Night and Help!, released to huge acclaim in 1964 and 1965, and The Knack...and How to Get It, also from 1965. All combine quintessential '60s content with anything-goes editing style that captures the era's unstoppable energy, which Lester-an American who moved to England in his early twenties-knew from both sides of the Atlantic.
Petulia reached theaters in 1968, the year when public fascination with youthful idealism and psychedelia hit its peak, then started its slide into polarized debate over everything from the Vietnam War to the sexual revolution. The gifted George C. Scott plays Archie, a middle-aged San Francisco physician who's getting divorced just because he got "tired of being married." Young and beautiful Julie Christie plays Petulia, a self-described "kook" who comes on to Archie at a charity rock concert, announcing to this total stranger that she's been married all of six months and hasn't had an affair yet. Her husband, played with remarkable subtlety by Richard Chamberlain, is a businessman with a violent streak lurking behind his handsome smile. Important subplots center on Archie's unhappy former wife, his two young children, and a cheeky Mexican boy who brings major complications to Petulia's already complicated life. All this adds up to a sometimes intricate plot, but its main concern is the strange relationship between Archie and Petulia at once a casual fling, a potentially life-changing love affair, and a psychological puzzle too hard for either of them to solve. Petulia calls herself a kook but is far more disturbed than such a breezy word conveys; her husband is an abusive tyrant disguised as a regular guy; and even Archie, the most stable and successful of the group, is on his way to becoming an exhausted has-been whose ambition is simply to "feel something" again before he gets too old to care.


1. www.mcnblogs.com/digitaldretzka/2006/06/not_in_any_hurry_to_see_summer.html
2. www.crushedbyinertia.blogspot.com/2006/06/petulia.html
3. www.tcm.com/movienews/index?cid=136128&rss=mrqe
4. www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Lester
5. www.web.mit.edu/ipc/people/director/index.html