Well Deserved Praise

People are voting emotionally.

Excellent, smart action film.

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

A film version of the notorious novel by Terry Southern & Mason Hoffenberg. Ewa Aulin plays the title role, a not-so-bright sexpot who happens to continually be in the wrong place at the wrong time, encountering one sex fiend after another, from Mexican gardener Ringo Starr(!) to military man Walter Matthau to creepy poet Richard Burton. It's not particularly funny but it is highly entertaining with an occasional glimpse of real wit provided by screenwriter Buck Henry. It's a rambling film and the cameos come fast and furious...Marlon Brando, John Astin (in 2 roles!), John Huston, Anita Pallenberg, Florinda Bolkan and Charles Aznavour. Directed (using that term very loosely) by actor Christian Marquand. It's photographed very lushly by Giuseppe Rotunno. It's low-rent LOLITA but still worth seeing.

I guess I simply missed the humor in this "Supposed" spoof of the 60s and the military. (I have to say Austin Powers (Another spoof) is Jason Bourne compared to this movie). This film stands out as an all-time baddie, without a single redeeming factor about it. The worst part of this is the waste of the cast. I cannot imagine how you can possibly put Marlon Brando, Richard Burton, James Coburn, Walter Matthau, Elsa Martinelli and John Huston in a film and fail? This certainly does and it starts with a script that is so stupid I would sooner watch a marathon of Sponge Bob square pants. The main character Candy (Ewa Aulin) wanders through this film like she is basically stoned, and you could watch a porn film and find a wider degree of expressions on someone's face (Basically she makes Jenna Jameson look like Meryl Streep). Burton as a stupid poet named McPhisto (Which I guess is a takeoff on Dylan Thomas) comes out worst of all, it is by far and away the worst film he ever made, and Matthau as a General is not much better (And as a major comic actor should have known better)). I have seen films its compared to such "The Magic Christian" and "Casino Royale" (Sellers version) and they are better than this turkey. This film is without question the greatest waste of talent in motion picture history (Brando, Coburn, Matthau & Huston FOUR Oscar WINNERS (Burton nominated 7 times)), and thus belongs in my 10 All-Time worst film list (Not quite "Machete" or "Walk On The Wild Side" but pretty damn close). Essentially it warrants zero stars.

Not so good. The premise is simple enough, and it came pretty close to working in the novel by Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg: take Voltaire's Candide and set it in 60s America, with an innocent girl in place of the innocent young man, and, of course, make sex the central matter. The novel's Candy is led farther and farther into lovemaking because she embodies sympathy. This sympathy involves sensing the need men have for her without ever really understanding it, and so the joke is, apparently, that she has sex with various men because she misunderstands their lust for a deeper spiritual need—and this, the novelists suggest, is itself the essence of male sexuality: the wish for a compliant, innocent beauty. It's complicated satire, because at the same time it promotes and mocks arousal. Does the movie do this? No. The movie offers a series of comic bits, each featuring more or less great actors, encountering Candy: Richard Burton as the poet McPhisto, Ringo Starr as the Mexican gardener Emmanuel, James Coburn as the surgeon Dr. Krankheit, Walter Matthau as General Smight, Charles Aznavour as the hunchback, and Marlon Brando as the guru Grindl. Other parts: Anita Pallenberg, John Huston, John Astin, and Sugar Ray Robinson. The title part is played by Ewa Aulin, a young Swedish actress who's in over her head. She's pretty enough, but hardly subtle—more of a blank slate. The story, with a screenplay by Buck Henry, is mostly a picaresque sort of romp, with skits going on too long, so that the movie, despite its billing, is neither very sexy nor very funny. It's as if it were aiming for a sexier subject matter but a similar satirical approach as Dr. Strangelove, but it misses the mark nearly all the time.

For some reason I thought Tom Stoppard had a hand in it, but I was thinking of Terry Southern. Isn't that interesting? My memories of the film, which was played over and over again on the closed-circuit television network of the USS Forrestal during my 1974 Mediterranean cruise, were two: Richard Burton hoovering booze from the floor of his limo and Walter Matthau approaching Candy for sex in the cockpit of a military transport (this scene was repeated in Private Benjamin with Goldie Hawn). I vaguely remember Candy having sex with her comatose father, the appearance of Ringo Starr, and not much else. It's the kind of episodic story that functioned as porn in the late 60s--writers of porn didn't know how to built to a payoff, so they wrote a sex scene, moved the character to another situation, had another sex scene, and so forth (get a copy of The Devil in Miss Jones to see how it works, or Story of O, or Deep Throat, or anything of that era). Is there anything deeper to be seen in this movie? I really doubt it--it looks like a potboiler by a guy who has some bills. I don't have a clue how he got the stars to appear in it, but I'm sure Peter Sellers had a lot to do with that. And it's a gorgeous enough movie--the star is heartbreakingly beautiful and nubile; the sets are decorated with care. Terry's rep was looming pretty large with his Strangelove credit, too, so pretty much anything he ground out was bound to be printed and filmed. Whenever anyone wants to break out of short stories into novels, I advise them to follow this formula--write a series of related sex scenes. Write one a week for a year. Anyone can crank that much out. After a year, shuffle them and send them to an agent. Wait for the checks to come rolling in. What I don't get is why anyone would write about anything other than sex. It's all we care about as a species--having it, resisting it, trying not to think about it, trying to get it up, trying to keep it down, trying to get other people into bed, trying to get other people out of bed. Everything else is just window dressing. Candy is an important movie because it doesn't pretend anything else is important besides falling between the knees of a beautiful, nubile, not particularly bright young woman.