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The invocation of Vertigo in John Barry's score is key in a San Francisco tale of people finding and losing each other, then finding and losing again. Nob Hill and Ashbury Heights, the maimed elite ascends to a mod soiree awkwardly trying to bridge the bourgeoisie and Janis Joplin. The divorced surgeon (George C. Scott) is accosted by the flighty socialite (Julie Christie), a mechanized Tashlin motel sets the stage for the half-hearted liaison. "Stop being so damned casual, we're about to become lovers!" The new freedom and the malaise that comes with it, Fellini clutter and Resnais jitters, the heroine's pose of exhausted archness embodies it all with quirky tuba and internal bleeding. The idealized image is marriage to a dashing architect with a nasty temper (Richard Chamberlain), "our sailor boy and his pretty bride" across the border and into the sea as the lark darkens into tragedy. Richard Lester's homecoming, his masterpiece of flakiness into compassion. Scott and Shirley Knight whip up a symphony of anger, rue and alienated nuances around a bachelor pad and a bag of cookies, at the hospital Joseph Cotten as Mr. Old America (and Old Hollywood) laments the loss of values. "What's so great about not fighting?" Longhairs and screwballs, psychedelic clubs and roller-derbies, the whole counterculture megillah pulled into an unsettled cinematic skin by Nicolas Roeg's camera. Flashbacks and flash-forwards are the language of the end of the affair that never began, shock-cuts and freeze-frames and disembodied voices become not faddish gimmicks but raw nerves. Vietnam on TV, Alcatraz on the horizon, reverie and memory on the surgery table. "Kooky, though, isn't it?" In the end a simple desire, a plea for "something alive in all this steel and glass." With Arthur Hill, Pippa Scott, Kathleen Widdoes, Roger Bowen, Austin Pendleton, Lou Gilbert, Big Brother and the Holding Company, The Grateful Dead, and The Committee.
--- Fernando F. Croce |