Petulia

Richard Lester's San Francisco-set Petulia (1968), based on John Haase's novel Me and the Arch Kook Petulia, effectively captures the zeitgeist of the ‘60s—the Grateful Dead and Janis Joplin make cameo music appearances—while telling a time-fractured tragicomic love triangle story involving middle-aged Dr. Archie Bollen (George C. Scott), spoiled and abusive pretty boy David Danner (Richard Chamberlain), and Danner's free-spirited wife Petulia (Julie Christie). The film kicks off with the recently divorced Bollen (his ex-wife is played by Shirley Knight) being approached by the beautiful young Petulia, who is half-determined to have an affair, initiating a stop-and-start romantic pas de deux that masks troubling undercurrents of psychological fragility and emotional sterility. Given that director Lester helmed the Beatles movies, it's not terribly surprising to find a number of zany touches here—from a futuristic automated motel to a group of joyriding nuns—but Petulia's joie de vivre is almost aggressively hollow: there's a lot of unhappiness and loneliness lying beneath the witty banter and candy-colored Haight-Ashbury patina beautifully lensed by Nicolas Roeg (The Man Who Fell to Earth)—perfectly summarized in a shot of a solitary Bollen in his bachelor pad apartment with images of the Vietnam War playing on the TV screen. A peculiar film existing in a cinematic time capsule all its own, Petulia bows on DVD with a fine transfer and both a vintage featurette and a solid new “making-of” with producer Raymond Wagner, editor Tony Gibbs (who talks about the film's flashbacks and flashforwards), and actor Chamberlain. Highly recommended. (R. Pitman)