I gave this film a 9 out of 10, because it was exactly what I expected it to be.

There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

The son of Simon Jaglom, a wealthy Russian-Jewish financier from London who emigrated to New York just before World War II, Henry Jaglom has always possessed the means and confidence to pursue his own, sometimes highly idiosyncratic visions. His first film as a writer/director, 'A Safe Place', had its first incarnation in the mid-Sixties as a short-run Off Broadway play written by Jaglom and starring a then-unknown Tuesday Weld. Offered a film project by Columbia—through the auspices of 'Easy Rider' cohorts Bert Schneider and Dennis Hopper—Jaglom opted to turn his play into a film. Jaglom quite naturally signed Tuesday Weld to reprise the lead role of Susan/Noah, a young woman caught between two lovers and constantly retreating into her imagination (supposedly a "safe place"), which only seems to produce troubling memories of childhood that ultimately result in her ego dissolution and/or suicide. To complement what would turn out to be a magnetic performance by Weld—who drew on her own tumultuous youth for inspiration—Jaglom secured the services of other talented friends: Jack Nicholson (who plays one of Weld's lovers) and the legendary Orson Welles (who plays a street magician and Weld's titular father figure). Though he had his own play script to provide a blueprint for the film, Jaglom insisted on endless experimentation and improvisation. His cinematographer, Dick Kratina (who helped shoot 'Midnight Cowboy'), eventually shot some fifty hours of raw footage that Pieter Bergema edited down to 94 minutes (a shooting ratio of 32 to 1). In the end, though, 'A Safe Place' would achieve notoriety not for its acting, gritty New York City vistas, its strange soundtrack (combining Gershwin, Edith Piaf, Charles Trenet, and mid-century Tin Pan Alley tunes), or even a hilarious soliloquy by Gwen Welles on New York City mashers but for its copious use of jump cuts between past, present, and future events—a risky editing technique deemed brilliant by some critics and derided as nonsensical and confusing by others. Indeed, when 'A Safe Place' premiered at the 9th Annual New York Film Festival (Oct. 15, 1971), audience members broke into a passionate shouting match over its merits that nearly escalated into a donnybrook. Though it bombed in the United States, 'A Safe Place' predictably fared better in France; a theater in Paris is reputed to have shown it continuously over a seven-year period.

Henry Jaglom is a director I've heard about before, but had never seen one of his films. He makes a film every couple of years, they play in like three cities in America, and no one seems to like them. A Safe Place was his first film, adapted from his own play, which he wrote in 1964. Tuesday Weld plays an insufferable hippie chick who doesn't want to grow up. Phil Proctor is a square who wants desperately to bone her, so he puts up with her nonsense (he knows that she's half crazy, but that's why he wants to be there). Eventually, a much more exciting Jack Nicholson shows up and steals her away. Orson Welles plays a magician who occasionally enchants Weld with his magic. Gwen Welles (whom you might remember from Altman's films California Split and Nashville), in her film debut, also appears and rambles on about her dreams of being sexually assaulted. The film is pretty, and that prettiness is very much augmented by Tuesday Weld's enchanting beauty. But, honestly, there's not much going on here. It's very repetitive (there are some nice, old songs on the soundtrack, but each of them plays all the way through like three times), and, well, boring.

---and this brilliant little gem is proof thereof. Drawing almost equally from the French New Wave as he did Ambrose Bierce's AN OCCURRENCE AT OWL CREEK BRIDGE, Jaglom's "safe place" for Tuesday Weld's character is her own imagination, where her eccentricities can bloom in complete innocence without being impinged upon by the "real world." A gorgeous salad of fragments that collect themselves into a unit of an ethereal base, A SAFE PLACE is the kind of film you would imagine the artists whose drawings graced the pages of the "underground press" art papers (the San Francisco Oracle, for example) would try to make out of their visions. There are also nice parts for the actors Welles -- Orson, happy to perform as a magician in an all-too-rare chance, and Gwen, who is touching and magnetic in her first film role. Both Welleses left us before their time, and A SAFE PLACE provides a beautiful and unique glimpse of each.

I don't know why I hadn't seen this movie before. I find the script an almost perfect one, closer to poetry than to the novel and a cinema language that owes a lot to Jean Luc Godard but nevertheless contributes to a post-modern comprehension of cinema as an art form in constant evolution. A 'must see' for any serious student of the evolution of cinema.The film's cinematography, with a clear cut preference for close ups, is a contribution to the general epos of the story. A real masterpiece, which I am sure will gain in public aclaim as time passes. A 10 by any standard. Pedro Saad