Paul Mazursky’s Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice premiered at the New York Film Festival on September 17, 1969. The screenplay (co-written with Mazursky’s regular collaborator Larry Tucker) won top honors from both the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Society of Film Critics; Quincy Jones did the music and veteran cinematographer Charles Lang picked up a well-deserved seventeenth Academy Award nomination for his efforts.
BCTA, as we will call it from here, is a wildly ambitious film, eager to take a serious look at the then still emerging sexual revolution of the sixties, but with plenty of humor and warm spirits. This is considerably easier said than done: on the one hand the not un-titillating topic of free love risks invitations to farce and readily available exploitation; on the other, engaging the weighty issues Mazursky wished to explore could get pretty heavy pretty quickly, as Bergman would soon illustrate in his staggering masterpiece Scenes from a Marriage.
But BCTA walks this tightrope and pulls it off (if with a little wobble at the finish line)—it is a great film and one of the landmarks of the New Hollywood. This would not have been possible without the strength of the four central performances by Robert Culp, Natalie Wood, Elliott Gould, and Dyan Cannon (Bob, Carol, Ted, and Alice, respectively). Gould and Cannon put forth the more overtly impressive performances, and they were quite rightly showered with praise at the time. But to be savored is the way that Culp comes across as the most effortlessly cool cat on the planet (and there are aspects of his biography that suggest perhaps he was), and Natalie Wood, the only bona-fide movie star of the group when the film was in production, submerges herself in a subtle, challenging, and then-risky role.
Mazursky made several crucial choices in crafting his film, which furnish it with timeless power and wisdom a half-century later (if admittedly the “oh-wow” reactions you will surely have to the spectacular wardrobes situate the film in its time—and suggest Jerry might have been wrong about the whole puffy shirt thing). First, although the sexual revolution was most obviously associated with the young baby boomers embracing new, radical attitudes about “free love,” the principals in BCTA are very much not kids. Into the second decade of their own marriages, they are on the far side of thirty, and have kids of their own. (Culp, who is Mazursky’s alter-ego in a deeply personal film inspired by some of the director’s own experiences, was a bit older still; both men were about to touch forty.) BCTA, then, is less about the youthful exuberance of sexual freedom and more about the effect of the sexual revolution on a generation that came of age under the old rules but is still young enough to wonder what they might have missed.
A second inspired choice was to realize that the more dramatically consequential strand of the story was not the daring embrace of free-thinking by Bob and Carol, and their plunge into the brave new world of sexual liberation, but the effect of their transformation on the very settled relationship of their straight-laced best friends Ted and Alice. Suit-and-tie Ted – ever tempted but invariably faithful – is shocked (mostly that Bob would foolishly share the indiscretion of an infidelity with his wife); Alice, the straightest of them all – she smokes pot with the gang but “never gets high” – is shattered by the very notion (which is not all that surprising, given that the nightgown and sleep mask she wears to bed could pass for a suit of armor).
Mazursky’s cinematic achievement is to structure the film non-traditionally. The movie runs more than one hundred minutes, but it is composed of only nine or ten unnaturally long scenes (essentially: the Esalen Institute, at the restaurant, Bob back from San Francisco, the two couple after-party, Ted and Alice fight, pool parties and therapy, discovering Horst, the Vegas hotel room). With this configuration BCTA often has the rhythm of a Cassavetes film (and kudos to the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. for pointing this out at the time, noting the style as “somewhat influenced . . . by the Cassavetes of Faces.”) What this means in practice is that often scenes tend to go on for “too long”—that is, for longer than the viewer implicitly expects. But sticking with the characters as they rummage around what seems like the same old ground, often with some discomfort (for the characters and the audience), offers the opportunity to dig up truths only accessible after such extended effort. Nowhere is this more evident than in the utterly squirm-inducing twelve minute bedroom scene between Ted and Alice, nominally about sex (he’s in the mood, she’s not) but profoundly about the broader power dynamics of their relationship).
Finally, BCTA endures because, as a New Hollywood movie, it offers no easy answers. As Steven Farber observed, many of the films of the period “tell the young, liberal intelligent audience what it already knows,” but this film “implicates the educated audience more painfully.” The movie positions itself, in good sixties fashion, on the side of free love—but then comes up hard, and perhaps inevitably, against its limitations. As inhibitions loosen up (and off-screen trysts multiply, as Carol and Ted follow in Bob’s footsteps), the trajectories of our foursome converge towards the possibility of an orgy. This had been gently foreshadowed in the after-party scene where the couples are mismatched, and then again with Alice’s “Freudian slip” in therapy, and finally comes to a head in Vegas. Surprisingly but fittingly, the intense confrontation is initiated by Alice, who strips down to her underwear and challenges her friends to recognize the implications of their newfound philosophies. Arguments ensue, more clothes are shed, and the “long scene” again does it magic. (“She’s right, this is where we are at,” Carol finally concludes, as the women come around ahead of the men.)
Ultimately, Mazursky closed the set, threw his actors into one big bed—and didn’t tell them what to do next, which is why the tension on the screen feels so real. (The director would later recall that only Mr. Culp seemed rather at ease with the situation.) What does ensue makes perfect sense, but, again, raises more questions than it answers. Certainly, the liberation of sexuality was one of the great achievements of the 1960s. But it comes with its own contradictions and complications, ones that are not easily navigated.
Bob Has a Confession
Alice & Bob & Ted & Carol
Unintended Consequences: The Lives of Others
Alice Forces a Confrontation
Ted Protests
She’s right: “This is where we are”
