I Love You, Alice B. Toklas (1968) The screenwriters here, Paul Mazursky (soon to become a top director) and Larry Tucker no doubt thought their script nailed the late 60's zeitgeist as sharply as they were allowed to within the confines of a mainstream, technicolor Warner Brothers comedy........
Tucker and Mazursky wanted to have it both ways........with the film functioning as a gag-a-minute Neil Simon-ized farce about a kvetching middle class Jewish family and simultaneously, a satirical send-up of the counter-culture hippie lifestyle that enveloped the country in the wake of Vietnam, assassinations, riots and Richard Nixon.
The story presents a comedic collision of these two disparate worlds as the most straight-laced, neurotic and uptight of lawyers (Peter Sellers) falls for a mellow pixie dream hippie-chick (Leigh Taylor Young, impossibly doe-eyed and dewy-faced)
Then, for what this film thought would generate tons 'o fun, we watch the spectacle of Sellers instantly growing his hair shoulder length, ditching the 3 piece suits for bell bottoms, beads, and tie-dyed clothes festooned with peace symbols. Flower Power, baby...............
Or as Sellers defiantly declares, "I got pot, I got acid, I got LSD cubes.,,,.don't tell me about hip. I'm so hip it hurts! That's how hip I am!"
And predictably, it isn't long before Sellers, living the life of a societal 'drop out' does hurt......when he sees the dreamy, free-loving Taylor Young has turned his upscale apartment into a teeming commune, overflowing with as many hippie stereotypes as Mazursky and Tucker could cram into one single scene.
The film's inconclusive conclusion, a tad unique for the time, had Sellers abandoning both of the opposing lives he led......his structured conservative lawyer-ly existence and the doped-up, zen-like 'peace, love and understanding universe of hippie-dom.
He ends up like the rest of us........running down the street in search of a balanced life that'll make him happy.
In a way, the movie served as a kinder, gentler pre-cursor to the wave of far more serious 'straights vs. hippies' films that finally hit theaters in 1970........filled with violent confrontations between cops and anti-war student rebels.
But back in 1968, Hollywood still thought the culture collisions were yock-worthy....(for another bizarre example, see our 5/7/20 post on '68's woeful MGM farce, "The Impossible Years")
Which is why the Sellers film's primary laugh set-piece consists of Sellers and his entire family getting baked out of their minds as they gobble up a pile of Taylor Young's chocolate brownies....not realizing she made the snacks from the Alice B. Toklas cookbook recipe, with a generous helping of weed.
Not a bad idea for a comedic set-up, but the film was a directed by a TV sitcom warhorse, Hy Averback, and he hammers the sequence into the ground, letting it drag on for an unfunny eternity.
The high point, as you might expect, is the always chameleon-ish work of Sellers, who slips effortlessly into the role of a 60's American corporate nebbish turned uncomfortable flower child.....and there's a far more subtle kind of humor to be found in his newly discovered disdain for the life he dropped into......(he begins to sound like an impatient Alice at the mad tea party.....)
Then again, who in their right mind could ever resist the illegally adorable Leigh Taylor Young and her Alice B. Toklas brownies? 2 & 1/2 stars (**1/2)
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