Petulia
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VHS Movie Reviews of Petulia
Movie Review: "Petulia": the sweet smell of success
Summary: 4 Stars
An excellent 60's period piece. The entire cast is excellent and especially the joyous and wonderful Julie Christie. A film to relish over and over again.Movie Review: Julie Christie and George C Scott Shine in this Classic
Summary: 5 Stars
Warner Bros never cease to thrill me much of the time with classic film releases to DVD. I hope they continue unveiling classics like this from their endless vaults. Warner Bros does another great job using cover art work from the original film release artwork used, and it looks great! I also love it when you get to see in classic films like Petulia the original Warner Bros film logos that opened the film when they were first released... sometimes this is where Warner Bros fails to bring back the magic when they use their newer fresher logos on films that never were released with these logos to begin with. Still Petulia is a classic and many should take a chance and see this classic for what it is. Richard Lester's direction and Nicholas Roeg's cinematography is a great escape to view late 1960's San Francisco! Movie Review: Petulia
Summary: 5 Stars
Set in San Francisco at the height of the Summer of Love, Lester's stylish melodrama pays homage to the swinging sixties in more ways than one: Through jarring jump cuts, flashbacks and "flash forwards," and glimpses of the Grateful Dead performing for a crowd of gyrating hipsters, the director evokes the psychedelic ethos of the era as a way in to the turbulent lives of Archie and Petulia, each of whom is suffering a private torment: she is a victim of abuse, while he just wants to "feel something." Scott and Christie are exemplary in their roles, while Chamberlain gets to look pretty, sulk, and act like a cad. Lensed by Nicholas Roeg, "Petulia" is a trippy tale of love and confusion that explores the humid underside of flower power.Movie Review: It's the Pepsi Generation.
Summary: 5 Stars
Petulia (1968) is a personal favorite of mine and Julie Christie is my all-time favorite actress. I remember seeing this movie on the late movie as a teenager and being awed by the acting. the major photography and the editing.
I beleive Richard Lester directed this film in a chaotic, revelatory way to express the "reality" of what was going down around these characters and in their personal lives as well. Kind of like filming a tragedy of errors in the middle of a psychedelic trip.
Richard Chamberlain in the performance of his career. Joseph Cotten is welcome in any film that I view. Shirley Knight gives an incredible performance as one who has no control over their marriage at all anymore, but is clinging to the fantasy that she is in complete control. Kudos to all the supporting cast.
And George C. Scott, of course, whether he knows what he's doing or not, he's still giving a brillant performance, a healer who forgets his own importance in this life. His kids, his wife, his friends don't understand his situation, only Petulia.
Julie Christie as Petulia: she witnesses George C. Scott's character operate on a Mexican kid with whom she is personally involved. When she meets him at a benefit, she already knows who he is, and she wants to force herself into his life and his situation, even giving him the illusion of having a one-night stand. In doing so, she becomes his troubled muse, and he soon learns some shocking truths about her life.
These situations only begin to explain that this movie has several different levels to operate on, and requires multiple viewings to understand. And that is just fine, because the viewer falls in love with the characters and the story that much more after successive viewings.
This movie was certainly filmed in the right place at the right time. It is Greek tragedy filled with chaos and uncertainty and populated by souls coming to a spiritual crossroads, thinking that they have made a substantial change in their lives, yet doing nothing but becoming more hedonistic, crazy and materialistic in the process. Kinda sounds like America in the sixty's, doesn't it?
This movie is an invaluable document describing the conciousness of people at a cross-roads looking toward an uncertain and materialistic future.
Richard Lester, Julie Christie Richard Chamberlain and Nic Roeg all four deserved Academy Awards for this film. However, I give them the first honorary Orson Welles award in tribute for unrecognized filmmaking beyond the call of duty.
I'll be loving this movie the rest of my days.
Oh yes, the Grateful Dead and Big Brother for a few moments in the film, a miniscule document of their musical presence in the city by the bay in the summer of love. Or was it the fall?
Movie Review: "I'm going to marry you, Archie."
Summary: 4 Stars
The beautiful Julie Christie - there has never been another screen actress, before or after who has had her radiant appeal. She made Petulia - a strange, hyperbolic and surreal sort of film - in 1968 at the height of her stardom. She'd just won the Best Actress Oscar for Darling a few years previously and was now considered one of the icons of the swinging sixties, which made the decision to have her star in this film all the more appropriate.
Now finally released DVD, Petulia is just as bizarre, frustrating - and even as irritating - as it was thirty years ago, but the film is worth revisiting, mainly for performances by Christie, Scott and Chamberlain and also for the colourful images of San Francisco during the late 1960s. Directed by Richard Lester, with Nicolas Roeg as cinematographer - who gives the film an artier look than it really deserves - Petulia skewers time like a knife.
The film utilizes fast forward and backward cuts, which at the time seemed avant-garde and unconventional, but today it comes across as sort of exasperating. It begins when Petulia, a rich, married, kooky waif, played by Julie Christie, propositions Archie, a tired divorced surgeon, played by George C. Scott, at a San Francisco charity ball. She tells him that she has a husband, but that she desperately wants to have an affair with a married man.
Obviously a little odd, Petulia manages to capture Archie's heart and arrives with a tuba and bruises at Scott's apartment quite early one morning. He's a little hesitant to get involved with her as he still has feelings for his wife Polo (Shirley Knight). Archie's friends, Barney and Wilma (Arthur Hill and Kathleen Widdoes), understanding nothing, show him films of himself and his former wife, in hopes of reconciliation.
Meanwhile, Petulia's marriage to her husband David (Richard Chamberlain) is on the skids and when he finds out about her affair with Archie he brutally abuses her. Her father-in-law (Joseph Cotten) visits her bedside while Polo parades her new lover in front of Archie. He in turn tries to have a relationship with his sons and everything plays out in such a fractured, arty and shattered way that it's as though someone had intentionally devastated a perfectly fashioned and crafted film.
Although these were turbulent times in America, the film only hints at the social change that was starting to take place. Both Petulia and Archie are quite straight, upper-middle class people; no way do they affiliate themselves with the hippy, counter-culture people, the sexual freedom advocates, and rock music fans, and druggies. But change is also affecting them and although they are as different as night and day, they somehow need each other.
Petulia is certainly endemic of the 60's; she's beautiful and playful, oscillating between affection and distance, and exasperatingly glamorous. The film almost plays out in a series of vignettes, without a definitive plot: Archie takes his kids out for a weekend; Petulia unwittingly takes home a Mexican orphan. We constantly see these incidents in brief glimpses, as though Lester is determined to skewer reality, and make us take note of how these two characters are conflicted and vulnerable.
Petulia works pretty well as an exercise in how two neurotic people can be trapped by their own fate or by indecision. Don't expect a happy and fulfilled ending as by the film's conclusion, the characters face the same problems - Petulia is still trapped in a marriage to the jealous David and he unsure of his wife's commitment. Archie is still conflicted and cannot settle, and Petulia is unable to know if she can love anybody other than the poor and vulnerable Archie. Mike Leonard August 06.