I don't know about this one. The point, if there was one, seemed to get by me. Multiple references to the film's source, Henry Miller's eponymous novel, don't help much. Much of Miller's appeal comes not just from his go-to-hell attitude towards life and art but from the way he expresses his sentiments on the page. Maybe he just doesn't translate well to the screen, not that Miller himself would care one way or the other.
The street words that Miller flung about so carelessly in his prose seem emphasized here, as if designed expressly to shock. Not just the F word either. Well the street words are old and established. Shakespeare worked a terrible pun on the C word into one of his comedies, I forget which. The F word goes back to the Angles and the Saxons or the Mooks and the Gripes or somebody. Wait a minute -- the C word was also worked into a pun in "Hamlet," come to think of it.
"I feel like going out and getting myself a fatal dose of clap." Well, no kidding. Are we supposed to be shocked? Maybe we were, back in 1970, if we had blue hair and lived in Dogpatch, USA.
If Henry Miller doesn't add much cachet, neither do Country Joe and the Fish, whose music whangs away on the sound track with lyrics that are as pointlessly vulgar as the horribly dubbed dialog.
Ben Webster is okay, though. And the photography, though irritatingly grainy, is several steps removed from the billowing pastels of soft-core porn. It's honestly black and white, and the naked bodies, of which there are plenty, aren't painted, trimmed, or shaved. If the babe has a pimple anywhere, you see the pimple. And the guys are bald on top and hairy everywhere else. A for sincerity there.
The story goes no place. There is no story. People run around half naked on the streets of Paris, flapping their arms and panting, supposedly having a great time. Half a dozen ordinary-looking people slosh around in a tub pouring wine over one another and laughing giddily because the director told them to act as if they were having the grandfather of all good times. (The French do this joi de vivre stuff better.) In the first scene of the film, the bespectacled hero, a pallid imitation of Miller, picks up a girl in a café and, after sex, gives her all his money, can't get any more credit at the restaurants, and is forced to raid his own garbage pail for leftover nuggets. Plenty of sex but not enough food. That's how a viewer feels after watching this.
I wish this movie had been better. It was dumped on for obscenity, but the sexual and linguistic candor was at least an innovation in a mainstream movie. It deserves dismissal, true, but only because it lacks any substance. As it is, it stands as an historical curiosity.
The street words that Miller flung about so carelessly in his prose seem emphasized here, as if designed expressly to shock. Not just the F word either. Well the street words are old and established. Shakespeare worked a terrible pun on the C word into one of his comedies, I forget which. The F word goes back to the Angles and the Saxons or the Mooks and the Gripes or somebody. Wait a minute -- the C word was also worked into a pun in "Hamlet," come to think of it.
"I feel like going out and getting myself a fatal dose of clap." Well, no kidding. Are we supposed to be shocked? Maybe we were, back in 1970, if we had blue hair and lived in Dogpatch, USA.
If Henry Miller doesn't add much cachet, neither do Country Joe and the Fish, whose music whangs away on the sound track with lyrics that are as pointlessly vulgar as the horribly dubbed dialog.
Ben Webster is okay, though. And the photography, though irritatingly grainy, is several steps removed from the billowing pastels of soft-core porn. It's honestly black and white, and the naked bodies, of which there are plenty, aren't painted, trimmed, or shaved. If the babe has a pimple anywhere, you see the pimple. And the guys are bald on top and hairy everywhere else. A for sincerity there.
The story goes no place. There is no story. People run around half naked on the streets of Paris, flapping their arms and panting, supposedly having a great time. Half a dozen ordinary-looking people slosh around in a tub pouring wine over one another and laughing giddily because the director told them to act as if they were having the grandfather of all good times. (The French do this joi de vivre stuff better.) In the first scene of the film, the bespectacled hero, a pallid imitation of Miller, picks up a girl in a café and, after sex, gives her all his money, can't get any more credit at the restaurants, and is forced to raid his own garbage pail for leftover nuggets. Plenty of sex but not enough food. That's how a viewer feels after watching this.
I wish this movie had been better. It was dumped on for obscenity, but the sexual and linguistic candor was at least an innovation in a mainstream movie. It deserves dismissal, true, but only because it lacks any substance. As it is, it stands as an historical curiosity.