Candy
Original post date: 30 March 2019
Rating: ✭✭✰✰
When people say if you can remember the 1960s then you weren’t there, they are talking about not remembering this movie. Definitely a candidate for best time capsule of 1968, a mere recitation of its plot points and cast members sounds like an incredibly unlikely evocation of the era. A sort of sex-and-drug-addled reinvention of Voltaire’s Candide, the film follows the travails, adventures and education of a nubile naïf from the American Midwest. Give the film credit for making a woman the central character in this spiritual odyssey and try to overlook the fact she is played by a stunningly beautiful Swedish actor (18 at the time of the movie’s release) who is required by the plot to strip down to her underwear at least once in every reel. As played by Ewa Aulin, high school student Candy is a total innocent but of the kind that was lasciviously photographed and airbrushed in the male fantasy pictorials of Playboy magazine at the time (so I’m told). Things are set in motion when a famous drunk Welshman (Richard Burton, perhaps thinking he is playing against type) comes to her high school and sets his eye on her. (His driver happens to be boxer Sugar Ray Robinson.) Next thing she knows, she’s being ravished on a pool table by her family’s Mexican gardener, whose strangely liverpudlian accent may be explained by the fact he is played by Ringo Starr. The bit where her father and the entire PTA stumble onto them is the single funniest scene in the whole movie. Anyway, targeted for revenge for Ringo’s now-crushed dreams of the priesthood, poor Candy is pursued by his biker chick sisters, who seem to have escaped from a Russ Meyer movie. Other encounters include a gung-ho general (Walter Matthau), a theatrical brain surgeon who plays to an audience (James Coburn), a hospital administrator (John Huston), a long-haired mystical guru (Marlon Brando) traveling in his own lorry, and a hunchback juggler (Charles Aznavour). The name of Candy’s father (John Astin) is T.M. Christian, and his initials might just stand for “The Magic” since The Magic Christian (also adapted as a movie featuring Ringo Starr), like this film, was co-written by Terry Southern. The screenplay is by Buck Henry, who the previous year co-wrote The Graduate. This crazy movie was directed by French actor Christian Marquand, who turns up in the film playing, well, a crazy movie director. He got the funding to make this because of the participation of his friend Brando, who owed him a favor for helping him purchase a Tahitian island from the French government. You gotta love the sixties!
Rating: ✭✭✰✰
When people say if you can remember the 1960s then you weren’t there, they are talking about not remembering this movie. Definitely a candidate for best time capsule of 1968, a mere recitation of its plot points and cast members sounds like an incredibly unlikely evocation of the era. A sort of sex-and-drug-addled reinvention of Voltaire’s Candide, the film follows the travails, adventures and education of a nubile naïf from the American Midwest. Give the film credit for making a woman the central character in this spiritual odyssey and try to overlook the fact she is played by a stunningly beautiful Swedish actor (18 at the time of the movie’s release) who is required by the plot to strip down to her underwear at least once in every reel. As played by Ewa Aulin, high school student Candy is a total innocent but of the kind that was lasciviously photographed and airbrushed in the male fantasy pictorials of Playboy magazine at the time (so I’m told). Things are set in motion when a famous drunk Welshman (Richard Burton, perhaps thinking he is playing against type) comes to her high school and sets his eye on her. (His driver happens to be boxer Sugar Ray Robinson.) Next thing she knows, she’s being ravished on a pool table by her family’s Mexican gardener, whose strangely liverpudlian accent may be explained by the fact he is played by Ringo Starr. The bit where her father and the entire PTA stumble onto them is the single funniest scene in the whole movie. Anyway, targeted for revenge for Ringo’s now-crushed dreams of the priesthood, poor Candy is pursued by his biker chick sisters, who seem to have escaped from a Russ Meyer movie. Other encounters include a gung-ho general (Walter Matthau), a theatrical brain surgeon who plays to an audience (James Coburn), a hospital administrator (John Huston), a long-haired mystical guru (Marlon Brando) traveling in his own lorry, and a hunchback juggler (Charles Aznavour). The name of Candy’s father (John Astin) is T.M. Christian, and his initials might just stand for “The Magic” since The Magic Christian (also adapted as a movie featuring Ringo Starr), like this film, was co-written by Terry Southern. The screenplay is by Buck Henry, who the previous year co-wrote The Graduate. This crazy movie was directed by French actor Christian Marquand, who turns up in the film playing, well, a crazy movie director. He got the funding to make this because of the participation of his friend Brando, who owed him a favor for helping him purchase a Tahitian island from the French government. You gotta love the sixties!
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