Wonderfully offbeat film!

Who payed the critics

Good concept, poorly executed.

Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

The free love era of the late 1960's is here on film. Jack Nicholson and Art Garfunkel are college room mates trying to score women. It is a fairly hard R rated film .There is a fleshy sequence of Ann Margaret with Nicholson that fires up the imagination. Nicholson while restrained does show some of the stuff that he would really cut loose later in films. While it is an interesting film for the period, supposedly based on Gerfunkels college experience, I got the impression they held back on the wildness, partly because Candice Bergen is her and she does not ever take off her clothes. She disappears halfway through the flick because if she stuck around she might have to take some off.There is a fair amount of talent in this one, but the script is a bit of a let down because it really makes the reality of the past seem better than it actually was.

This movie attracts quite a lot of admiration here which puzzles me. It is a kind of summation of the awfulness of the sixties sexual revolution - its sourness, acute misogyny, deep unhappiness and disconnect. The two male protagonists, well played by Nicholson and Garfunkel, though their roles are really nothing but stereotypes, are equally unsympathetic, self obsessed, selfish, duplicitous and vain, while the women are just there as sex objects. It's a deeply depressing movie. The film has dated badly, as one would expect, and with such a bleak message it's hard to see why anybody except an admirer of the lead actors would bother with it today.

For the first half hour the characters are so disgusting and terrible, the feeling of bile rising in my throat doesn't subside. These are the people who I have known. And while I cannot bring myself to turn it off, I also can't help but fondly remember watching all of his movies that he made before this one, the spark that say The Graduate or Catch-22 had, and this just feels a little flat. But at the same time, it seems to completely succeed in doing what it sets out to do, creating something suffocatingly real, like watching the most depressing moments in my life played back for me with dim lighting and blonder actresses. The fact that Candice Bergen goes away after that also helps. Upper middle class ennui is something that's almost always tedious to watch, but this is actually affecting. Nonetheless, this feels like the beginning of the end for Mike Nichols. He would never again make anything on a level with Catch-22, and he followed this one up with Day of the Dolphins. Seriously. wtf. Also for the curious, pop star Arthur Garfunkle (as the back of the DVD box puts it) gives a surprisingly strong performance in this.

Nearly forty years ago this film felt almost horrifying to me, watching today it just seems depressing. The picture is an indictment of the entire 'the more we have, the more we want' mentality that ultimately leads to 'the more we get, the less we have' outcome. As the picture reveals, it probably takes a two or three decade span of failed relationships to figure all that out, even with the right role models in place. This review comes right in the middle of the tragic Tiger Woods extra-marital affair fiasco, and I ask myself if Woods would have learned anything if he had seen this picture earlier in his career. I don't think so.With the benefit of hindsight, "Carnal Knowledge" excels in portraying how things used to be back in those awkward days before everyone was forced to grow up before the age of ten or so. Today everyone has a cell phone, but there was a time when an entire floor of a women's college dorm had to share one. It would be virtually impossible today for Sandy (Art Garfunkel) to be unaware of Jonathan's (Jack Nicholson) involvement with Susan (Candice Bergen); somebody would have caught them on camera and posted it on the internet. So in that respect, the film is undeniably dated. Yet for it's time, the picture was a landmark in exploring the consequences of love and lust in a way that furthered a breakdown in the once traditional values of fidelity and morality. Today, I believe that liberal mission is almost complete.Interesting the way Nicholson took so many showers in the story. He always did it right after bedding down a conquest. It felt like he was attempting to subliminally wash away the grime of his own creepy existence. Moving in on your best friend's girl puts you in a special class of heel I think, and I surmise that Sandy 'got it' when Jonathan unceremoniously dismissed Susan in his apartment slide show. Wouldn't it have been great to see a scene between Jonathan and Sandy of the same magnitude as when Jonathan went off on Bobbie (Ann-Margret). It would have been good to see Sandy grow a pair to blow off twenty years worth of steam over the deception of a college buddy. But then again, Sandy was entranced by the ever wise, ever knowing new eighteen year old girlfriend. It's a good thing Carol Kane didn't have a speaking part.I'm curious today how Art Garfunkel wound up in the film opposite Jack Nicholson. That casting decision still eludes me, as his screen credits before and since have been scattered and somewhat eclectic. Nicholson, Bergen and Ann-Margret all received a boost of recognition with the commercial success of the film at the time as far as I can recall. It would be interesting to hear their thoughts about the picture and their roles in it with the perspective of nearly forty years gone by.