"Bob, Carol, Ted and Alice" go to bed

"Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice" (1969) a feature film depicting the impact of the 1960s sexual revolution was the first film directed by Paul Mazursky. 


It  portrays two "normal," middle class couples in the late 1960s in Southern California who are trying to cope with the challenge of adapting to new cultural and sexual norms, particularly with regard to marital fidelity. These evolving norms and values were spilling over into the mass culture of the sixties from the hippie counterculture and from "growth centers" like Esalen, direct outgrowths of the recently established AHP (Association for Humanistic Psychology)  and the Human Potential Movement, that had been developed by Abraham Maslow, Jim Bugental, and other Young Turks from the American Psychological Association. 

Taken as a period piece, when the sexual revolution was rapidly evolving, spreading, and redefining the country's moral codes, this seemingly "almost documentary" feature film was a shrewdly observed, sharply comic character study of some typical attitudes and behaviors of the Southern California bourgeoisie. 

I lived through every action and emotional expression  recorded so accurately and non-judgmentally in this film myself; it felt very gratifying/satisfying to me to see my   many scenes that seemed to be almost deja vu replications of my own Esalen Institute experiences--from nonverbal I/Thou encounters and nude hot tub touchy-feeley explorations to pillow-pounding, wild screaming, dope smoking and psychodramatic improvs brought back to life on the flat HD screen in my bedroom last night. What a delightful experience!

Watching this movie today--in 2012--one can understand what the critics who talk about "a golden age of Hollywood in the 1960s and 1970s" mean. This was a wonderfully permissive  time for a new generation of directors to push the limits of classic forms like romantic comedy and amazingly, somehow they got the freedom to do it. 

Mazursky was one of the first--and best--directors who stretched out beyond the limits of the restrictive formulas for presenting heterosexual romantic relationships at a  time when the censorship code effectively prevented Hollywood moviemakers from depicting explicitly sexual scenes between men and women making love nudely and very passionately.                   


I remember how I couldn't "get no satisfaction" in the 50s because of a very irritating pattern in movies of visual coitus interruptus. Every time things seemed about to get really interesting, the director would discretely fade the image to black or abruptly switch to another scene, leaving me sexually aroused and compelled to fill in the blanks with my own adolescent hormone-driven horney imagination.

Here's a brief summary of the film. It’s California, 1969. Bob, a hip documentary filmmaker (played by Robert Culp), and his gorgeous wife Carol, (played by Natalie Wood at her most charming), arrive at a place very much like the Esalen Institute in Big Sur. They've come to make a film about a "marathon" (24 hour encounter group session).  As the camera zooms in and hovers like a peeping tom over the Hot Baths, we see three busty nude women sitting immobile tall and proud like stone lions on the Greek islands.    Each is seated in a lotus position on her own white massage table exposing herself to the sun's rays while staring fixedly ahead at... nothing!!! (whereas at Esalen they'd be grokking the Pacific Ocean and listening to the surf crashing against the land on which the tubs and tables are perched)   


Skeptics initially, Carol and Bob soon become converted to the  Esalen ethic of total authenticity and honesty, which promoted absolute fidelity to one’s feelings--if not to one's spouse--and a commitment to expressing all feelings immediately, frankly and openly in the celebrated almost sacred "Here and Now". Remember the groovy narcissistic "Gestalt Prayer" emblazoned on posters depicting one of Esalen's primadonna stars, Fritz Perls:

"You do your thing, honey,  and I'll do mine.                                                      If we should meet, that's groovy; if not, too bad!"                              [my translation JRS]

Much comedy ensues when Bob and Carol pitch their new code of "honest-nothing-withheld communication-and-behavior" to their uninitiated straight friends, Ted and Alice, (played by a youthful Elliott Gould and Dyan Cannon). The plot gets rolling when Bob guiltily reveals a spontaneous one-night stand of the previous night when he was away in Chicago on a business trip. Surprisingly instead of being pissed off and expressing these appropriate feelings to her miscreant spouse,  Carol claims that she feels nothing and instead is so impressed with his "honesty" that she kisses him warmly, and tries to convince her bewildered remorseful hubby that he's really done nothing wrong at all, despite the guilt that he feels, and instead deserves only praise for his courage and his willingness to confess his adultery to her! However bob feels guilty and wants to be punished, No go, however. Instead Carol reacts by proudly boasting about Bob's "honesty" as she recounts the story to a shocked Ted and Alice insisting that Bob did not really cheat on he because this "slip" has been more than compensated for by his honest confession. Bob reacts with disgust and embarrassment at this revelation and attacks Carol for hiding her true feelings (which he seems to know better than she does). 
Later in the movie when Ted defiantly confesses his adultery to his wife, Alice, she doesn't praise him at all, but beats his head with her fists, which seems a lot more "honest" to me than does Carol's total acceptance, forgiveness, and even praise of her husband for betraying her!

However,  after Alice has a moment to think about it, she goes Carol one better and invites Bob to strip and screw her, or even better, to have a four person orgy, and she then begins to clap her hands ant chant like a cheerleader: orgy, orgy,orgy! 


I won't reveal any more of the plot, because I don't want to spoil it for you by revealing the astounding twist at the end. 

There is a hilarious sequence in which Ted, aroused by smoking grass and hanging out with Bob and Carol, makes moves on his turned-off wife Alice later in the evening. His pitifully persistent quest for sex from a spouse who “doesn’t feel like it” skewers a male need that most married couples will recognize instantly. 

The film is truly a satire – reality carried to absurd lengths – and the marvelous performances Mazursky gets out of his entire acting ensemble means that, no matter what a character says or does,      it feels really authentic to the audience. 

In effect, Paul Mazursky’s amazing directorial debut invites us right into the lives and bedrooms of the four principals. However, this movie is not really about swingers.  It is about people who think they are open to new experiences who come to find that maybe they aren’t as free and open as they would like to believe they are.  Movies today seem to be shot like music videos--in short, easily digestible scenes. This movie  presents these characters as flawed, in long--but absolutely riveting--scenes filled with richly presented character delineation and dialogues. Mazursky’s style of filmmaking is really theater-based-–-featuring long scenes played out with two actors, and sometimes four actors, with much improvisation. 

One of the main reasons to see this film is simply to enjoy watching Natalie Wood (looking absolutely gorgeous and acting terrifically as always), who could have been the biggest movie star ever. This film was so big that Natalie got a percentage of the profits, and earned 5 million from it--which was a lot of money at that time.

All of the major players never looked better! The clothes are perfectly suited to the characters. The music by Quincy Jones is sensational. Rather than spoon-feeding you the filmmaker’s desired emotional response to a scene, the music lets you feel like you are in the room, listening to what could  have seemed like very dated music if it was not done so well. There are also scenes with absolute silence, where you are forced to watch even closer.  The film is divided into a few very long,  in-depth scenes that simply would not work today.  I don't recommend it for those with short attention spans.

To conclude, to viewers today "Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice"is a cult classic like "The Big Lebowsky" another delightful satire of the Hippie ethos of the late sixties/early seventies. Both of these movies depict the spread and impact of Hippie values, beliefs and practices and the impact of the “free love” movement at the end of the sixties as it trickled down to people we would now consider as “yuppies”.  

 Interestingly, Mazursky revisited the same basic ideas in Scenes from a Mall (1991), which enabled him to show how much popular cultural attitudes had changed between the late 1960s and the early 1990s.    Here, the cultural clash between hippies and the middle class allows him to adeptly explore a number of themes, ranging from hippie ideals--as a trend to be followed rather than ideals that are believed in for their own sake--to the psychological conflicts of intrinsic desires either against other intrinsic desires or against cultural conditioning and expectations. This was his first feature and Mazursky employs artful restraint so that these themes are only implicit, but they're definitely present.

Unlike a lot of the films rooted in the counterculture of the sixties, I believe that "Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice" dates well because essentially it is a film that champions fidelity. How else could you      expose the shallow aspects of free love without making a farce of it?