It would only be a slight exaggeration to say that the title of this never-released-in-theaters 1971 production serves as a pretty appropriate description of the seemingly interminable boredom this ill-conceived film generates. Really not much more than an unimaginatively filmed stageplay, this psychobabble-driven drama about a prominent psychiatrist’s 24-hour marathon head-shrinking session. His patients are ten troubled, emotionally needy people, many of whom have turned to drugs to blot out the disappointing realities of their lives.
This is partly the unfortunate brainchild of actor-writer William Devane, who would still be a few years away from his bone-crunching performance in 1977’s brutal Vietnam-vet revenge flick, Rolling Thunder. In 300-Year Weekend Devane is on an entirely different acting trip: playing the truck-driving Tom, one of the few mellowed-out characters in this group of mostly high-strung attention seekers. The group leader, Dr. Marshall (Michael Tolan) brings his thin-skinned fiancée Nancy (Sharon Laughlin) along, a decision that has predictably dire consequences. There’s a married couple on the verge of divorce who don’t fare particularly well in this unfiltered public therapy session.
True, pulling off a visually minimalist, monologue-driven film like this is not exactly easy—a My Dinner with Andre only comes around once in a blue moon, after all. But sadly, this film’s most significant achievement is that despite its modest hour-and-a-half running time manages to create the illusion that the full 24-hour session is being captured in real time—probably not an enviable achievement. The film’s central conceit of strict verité is mildly interesting in its own right: the script is based on transcripts from an actual marathon psychotherapy session run by a nonfictional eccentric doctor in the late 1960s. Still, the 300-Year Weekend’s highfalutin’ psychoanalytical concepts transferred to celluloid simply fail to make for a consistently watchable final product. Not Recommended.