'THE IMPOSSIBLE YEARS'......MGM'S REVOLTING YOUTH......

The Impossible Years (1968)   Oh those wacky, hippie teens with their free love and contempt for authority.......aren't they kooky and adorable?

             That'll give you an idea of how Hollywood studio warhorses viewed anyone 22 and under........as gag fodder.....

               For this museum piece, the rapidly crumbling MGM exhumed one of those creaky Broadway-produced sex comedies.......the kind designed to tickle the theater-party matrons who sat in the upper balcony.....

                  Broadway clung to these crappy plays like life preservers all through the turbulent 1960's......(read William Goldman's "The Season" for the most devastating takedowns of them)......

                  Peppered with exhausted, hoary gags fished out of Neil Simon's wastebasket, these ancient artifacts arrived instantly out of date and out of touch.........but in true Hollywood knee-jerk reflexive action, studio execs still  turned some of  them into films........

                   You can only imagine how current "The Impossible Years" seemed when it slouched into theaters at the tail end of 1968, a year turned upside down with assassinations, riots and the ongoing divisive, toxic Vietnam war.......

                  That's why we subtitled this post with a line worthy of the film itself.......since the movie considers youth in revolt........as pretty revolting.

                  Super uptight and stuffy college psychiatry professor (David Niven) rails and sputters at the antics of his nubile 17 year old sexpot daughter (Cristina Ferrare)......who's just been hauled into a police station with a load of college kid protesters.....

                     Unbeknownst to Ferrare, her protest sign had an unspeakable word scrawled on the back of it.....(uh.....we' guessing 'F***' from the way this movie desperately milks it for laughs)

                      The exasperated Niven, who slurps booze when driven to nervous frenzy, also contends with Ferrare's coterie of potential boyfriends......

                        These include a boy next door who attempts no less that two gasping sexual assaults on an unwilling Ferrare (but hey, it's the swingin' 60's remember?),another dopey kid whose main talent is crashing to Niven's parked dar.......and a bearded, bohemian, artist named. prepare for hilarity,......Bartholomew Smuts     (which tells you right away that he's both pretentious and horny)

                      If that isn't enough for Niven, the family doctor (TV's Dad Next Door Ozzie Nelson) informs him Ferrare's physical shows her officially deflowered......which in this movie's skewed, smirky  morality is worse than Hester Prynne's Scarlet Letter........

                        For extra yuk-yuks, Ozzie routinely catches his patients' viruses and he's also the dad of Ferrare's boy-next-door wanne-be rapist......who plays 'Taps' on his trumpet when Ferrare dumps him......are you convulsed yet"

                        Determined as Hercule Poirot on the Orient Express, Niven calls together the three suspected boyfriends to identify which one de-virgined Ferrare.......and ends up in a fairly pathetic Three Stooges brawl with all of them.....

                          We'll go no further with this......other than to mention there's one last twist the movie pulls as to whom Ferrare had sex with.......but by that time, after the flood of sex jokes, teen jokes, booze jokes, psychiatry jokes......you'll hardly care......

                       It took Hollywood several more years to finally produce and release films that dealt, for better or worse, with the political, social and sexual upheavals of 1968.....they at last hit the market in 1970....

                       But in '68 itself, sex was still for snickering......and those young 'uns in revolt?   You already know the end of this punchline.......1 star (*)....and that's only for the sight of Ferrare in a fringed bikini......