![\"Petulia](\"https:\/\/travelingboy.com\/travel\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/petulia-poster.jpg\")
Director<\/b>: Richard Lester<\/p>\nDirector<\/b>: Richard Lester<\/p>\n
Writing Credits<\/b>: Lawrence B. Marcus (screenplay), John Haase (novel), Barbara Turner (adaptation)<\/p>\n
Cast<\/b>: George C. Scott, Julie Christie, Joseph Cotten, Shirley Knight, Arthur Hill, Richard Chamberlain<\/p>\n
Music<\/b>: John Barry<\/p>\n
Cinematography<\/b>: Nicolas Roeg<\/p>\nThe Knack and How to Misuse It<\/h2>\n
A Look Back at Petulia<\/i><\/strong><\/span> No doubt about it, Richard Lester has \u201cthe knack\u201d: considerable intelligence, explosive visual invention, unequalled cleverness with a camera. Petulia<\/b><\/i>, his latest, parades these virtues \u2013 and reveals the defects which prevent him from becoming a major artist. Petulia\u00a0<\/b><\/i>starts with an almost insurmountable disadvantage. It is based on a novel \u2013 Me and the Arch Kook Petulia<\/i><\/b> \u2013 by John Haase, who was aptly described by John Simon as \u201ca male Californian Rona Jaffe.\u201d The story is tired soap-opera material.<\/p>\n Lester\u2019s style largely derives from his early work as a director of TV commercials. In fact, A Hard Day\u2019s Night<\/b><\/i>, The Knack<\/b><\/i> and Help!<\/b><\/i> looked very much like stretched-out TV commercials, with their abrupt zoom shots, lack of story line, and quick, elliptical editing. The frenetic cutting wrecked A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum<\/b><\/i>. As John Russell Taylor said, \u201c\u2026 slow-burn comedy chopped up into little bits does not become fast, snappy comedy; it remains obstinately little bits of slow-burn comedy, but prevented from working satisfactorily even in their own terms.\u201d But this conflict between style and subject was an advantage in How I Won the War<\/b><\/i> \u2013 it permeated the movie with biting tension. In Petulia<\/b><\/i> he has found a good vehicle for his approach \u2013 upper-echelon California. Here San Francisco is a TV ad brought to life. Lester\u2019s sharp commentary on contemporary values brings to mind what Tony Richardson (in The Loved One<\/b><\/i>) and Mike Nichols (in The Graduate<\/b><\/i>) have tried to do with similar settings. (Talking about intentions there is risky, as it\u2019s hard to find two more confused and muddled films.) Admittedly, Lester\u2019s target is not small, but he hits the mark with some regularity. The automated motel, the rows and rows of tract homes, the supermarket, the charity ball, the hospital where Archie operates become, in Lester\u2019s hands, set pieces of well-lit bleakness.<\/p>\n Lester uses the comments of bystanders on the edges of the story very effectively \u2013 much as he did in The Knack<\/b><\/i>. They serve as a kind of chorus, remarking on the main action. When Petulia is carried out of Archie\u2019s apartment after being beaten, the neighbors comment, \u201cOh Harry, come and look what\u2019s going on! \u2013 She\u2019s dead. \u2013 What happened to you? \u2013 She\u2019ll have a heck of a time washing that blood out of her hair.\u201d This empty speech and Lester\u2019s clever use of locations combine to make important statements about the stifling world the film\u2019s characters \u2013 and we \u2013 inhabit.<\/p>\n But Petulia<\/b><\/i> must be considered a failure, in spite of its many merits. Its story simply fails to convince. \u201cPetulia, you\u2019ve turned me into something crazy,\u201d says Archie. And again at the film\u2019s close: \u201cDid I change you, Archie?\u201d \u2013\u201cYou turned me into a nut.\u201d We are obviously supposed to believe that Petulia and Archie have switched positions at the end \u2013 that he has become a \u201ckook\u201d and she has become responsible. Archie says that \u201cone day\u201d he \u201cjust got very tired of being married.\u201d \u201cYou\u2019re a lonely screwed-up mess,\u201d Petulia tells him. When the film ends, Archie seems no less tired, lonely or screwed up than he was at its start. And Petulia has not gotten more responsible; she has become pregnant. Stanley Kauffmann correctly observed, \u201cThe only serious change in Petulia is that at last she is satisfying her starved maternal urge, which is not the same, necessarily, as undergoing a change of character.\u201d<\/p>\n As Archie, George C. Scott gives his finest movie performance since Dr. Strangelove<\/b><\/i>. His characterization is so strong that the film seems mistitled \u2013 it is Archie\u2019s story rather than Petulia\u2019s. Julie Christie, on the other hand, cannot transform the script\u2019s manifold flaws. Richard Chamberlain is surprisingly pointed as the weak, sadistic husband, and Shirley Knight (Archie\u2019s ex) is both frightened and scary. Petulia\u2019s reactionary father-in-law is the villain of the piece, and Joseph Cotton seemingly channels the silky, venomous tones of William F. Buckley, Jr. Prized in the theatre, Arthur Hill and Kathleen Widdoes have little to do.<\/p>\n Petulia<\/i><\/b> is technically superior. (Scott reported that Lester spent more time with the camera crew than with the actors.) Nicolas Roeg employs the full armory \u2013 focus racks, zoom shots, all types of camera movement, filters \u2013 and his vivid Technicolor palette emphasizes the contrasts in Lester\u2019s time shifts. Antony Gibbs edited The Knack<\/b><\/i>, and he keeps things moving along. The flashbacks are never unintelligible, while the few action sequences (the roller derby, Archie and his sons romping through Alcatraz, an auto-pedestrian accident) are stunning. The music is reticent and subdued; John Barry can be much more than his Bond scores.<\/p>\n Richard Lester has been called \u201cone of the film\u2019s New Men.\u201d Perhaps he is, but dazzle alone will never satisfy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" No doubt about it, Richard Lester has \u201cthe knack\u201d: considerable intelligence, explosive visual invention, unequalled cleverness with a camera. Petulia, his latest, parades these virtues \u2013 and reveals the defects which prevent him from becoming a major artist. Petulia\u00a0starts with an almost insurmountable disadvantage…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":45,"featured_media":507,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[117],"tags":[109,110,107,106,108,111],"class_list":["post-506","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-time-capsule-cinema","tag-george-c-scott","tag-julie-christie","tag-movie","tag-petulia","tag-review","tag-richard-lester"],"yoast_head":"\n
\nBy Walt Mundkowsky<\/i><\/p>\n![\"Julie](\"https:\/\/travelingboy.com\/travel\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/petulia-julie_christie1.jpg\")
We start at a fancy party. (Big Brother and the Holding Company are playing at a charity dance titled \u201cShake for Highway Safety.\u201d) Archie Bollen, a middle-aged surgeon who is divorcing his wife, is one of the party\u2019s hosts. Dancing with her husband is Petulia Danner, a working-class English girl from Bristol \u2013 her mother was a prostitute, she claims \u2013 who has married into San Francisco high society. The party bores Petulia (\u201cHighway safety is so blah\u201d), and she finds Archie interesting, so she propositions him rather awkwardly. (\u201cI\u2019ve been married six months and I\u2019ve never had an affair.\u201d) Petulia is the very embodiment of chic \u2013 upswept blonde hair, white ostrich feathers, jewels, etc. \u2013 and Archie half-heartedly accepts. They drive to an electronic nightmare of a motel, but she changes her mind. She continues to stalk him, though, finally breaking in on him and his mistress, shouting, \u201cAll that crap about the humanitarianism of the medical profession \u2013\u201d Out of resignation \u2013 or something \u2013 Archie takes her to bed. He leaves the next morning to spend the day at Alcatraz with his two sons. When he returns, his flat is a shambles; he finds Petulia on the floor, beaten into a bloody mess. Petulia and her father-in-law conceal the circumstances surrounding her injuries. Her husband was the assailant, but she goes back to live with him even though he has done this before. Archie is left helpless. Many months later Petulia enters the hospital where Archie works \u2013 to have a baby. Again he offers to save her from her unfortunate marriage. She turns him down, and the movie ends with one of her \u201ckooky\u201d rejoinders. \u201cWhen I lie dying, wondering what my life\u2019s been all about, you won\u2019t even cross my mind. No, wait \u2013 I lied \u2013 \u201d She adds gravely, \u201cI\u2019ll never forget you, Arnold.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"George](\"https:\/\/travelingboy.com\/travel\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/petulia-george_scott1.jpg\")
Petulia<\/i><\/b> is another commercial dilution of Resnais\u2019 fragmentation techniques, after The Pawnbroker<\/b><\/i> and Point Blank<\/b><\/i>. With Hiroshima mon amour<\/b><\/i> Resnais inaugurated the cinema flashback \u2013\u201cflash\u201d being the operative word. He showed just how suddenly and strikingly a memory can intrude. Lester makes extensive use of this: From start to finish he intercuts brief shots \u2013 Archie in the operating room, Petulia falling to the floor as her husband breaks her rib, an overexposed sequence of Petulia and her husband (a vastly inferior imitation of the brilliant tracking shot which floods the screen with light at the end of Resnais\u2019 L\u2019ann\u00e9e derni\u00e8re \u00e0 Marienbad<\/b><\/i>), Petulia breaking a window. Resnais\u2019 jumps through time and space always underline the theme that runs through his films: what John Ward calls the \u201cBergson-Proust dichotomy of Time the destroyer and Memory the preserver. But as Bergson points out and as Resnais never tires of affirming, memory does more than preserve; it also creates.\u201d Lester\u2019s scrambling of the time sequence in Petulia<\/b><\/i> carries none of these philosophical implications; he is merely using a narrative device which has become fashionable.<\/p>\n![\"Julie](\"https:\/\/travelingboy.com\/travel\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/petulia-julie_christie2.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"George](\"https:\/\/travelingboy.com\/travel\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/petulia-george_scott2.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"George](\"https:\/\/travelingboy.com\/travel\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/petulia-george_scott3.jpg\")
Haase\u2019s novel was \u201cadapted\u201d by Barbara Turner; the screenplay itself is credited to Lawrence B. Marcus. The supposedly flip dialogue is strained (\u201cMy name is Petulia.\u201d \u2013 \u201cI\u2019m not surprised\u201d), and the script does nothing to alleviate the novel\u2019s basic problems. The film\u2019s events seem too pat, too manipulated.<\/p>\n