Claysaba Excellent, Without a doubt!!

Afouotos Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

Huievest Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

Bluebell Alcock Ok... Let's be honest. It cannot be the best movie but is quite enjoyable. The movie has the potential to develop a great plot for future movies

Emil Bakkum The film Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice describes two married couples, who experiment with sexual attitudes, and finally end up together in bed for an orgy. The present-day morals see this narrative as offensive and shocking. Think about all those stains! However, it gets digestible, when the counter culture movement of the late sixties is taken into account. Hippies, the new left, and the humanistic psychology wanted to abolish all those morals, which seemed so oppressive and out of date. Everything is fantastic with a few more people. Collective action (communes!) was preferred over competition. Relations should be based on the free expression of emotions. Thus even parts of the middle class developed a liking for social experiments. Few, if any, conducts were deemed inappropriate. On the contrary, there seemed to be merit in them. And anyway, everybody looks funny naked. Against this background the film story is merely a voyage of discovery. It is even possible to chuckle about funny (or bizarre) scenes. Here are some: Carol pursues the waiter in a restaurant in order to express her gratitude. She praises the meatloaf. It was apple pie (joking). When Bob catches Carol for adultery in their own house, he presents a glass to his rival (Horst, the tennis Lehrer), and offers his extensive collection of whiskey marks. Drinking makes other people more interesting. Of course they smoke hashish. In bed Ted is frustrated when Alice rejects him. His efforts to engage in intercourse, even though she is not "in the mood", are hilarious. He fails, because the preservatives are all gone! She is evidently disturbed by the decay of morals, and visits a therapist. At the time even dogs had their own therapist. She tells that sometimes at home she walks about naked, and her son asked about her "titi" ("He is so sweet"). When in the end the two couples land in the same bed, they have clearly lost control. Here the film makers finally show their disapproval, and the orgy fails. It is simply a violation of human nature. Being a contemporary, I am still somehow mollified by this crazy abolishment of any taboo, but I can not remember why. I also acknowledge the slippery slope towards perversity and morbidity. Will the present youth loathe Bob and company?

classicsoncall Watching today, almost a half century after it was made, the movie comes across like a parody of the Sixties with it's free love and preoccupation with the sexual revolution. But if you were around back then, this was, I presume, a serious treatment of people in search of fulfillment and meaning and getting as much sex as you can while the getting is good. It also features Robert Culp wearing all of the most pretentious looking clothes one might have appropriated to impress like minded hedonists - Nehru jacket, frilly shirt, love beads and whistle - the kind of outerwear that I, even as a teenager at the time, fully regarded as a complete turn off.The best scene for me had Ted (Elliott Gould) trying to make love to his wife Alice (Dyan Cannon) right after learning their friend Bob (Culp) had a fling in San Francisco, with wife Carol (Natalie Wood) being so understanding about it. It's a scene every guy can relate to, because even knowing that his wife is seriously not in the mood, bad sex is still way ahead of anything in second place, and there's no giving up until he either scores or it becomes totally hopeless. With the cut away, you have to use your imagination on how that one turned out.Gould had another great scene when he confessed his infidelity about a fling in Miami. Trying to come to grips with it he's got the peanuts falling out of his mouth and he's just hilarious. Actually, all the principal players did a fantastic job with their characters, to the point that it's impossible to say who was best.Others reviewing the picture here make note of it's dated quality, and in a lot of respects I agree - the clothes, the hair styles, the whole Sixties vibe that pushes the envelope on relationships, open marriages and wife swapping in it's heyday. If you weren't around for the decade, this one offers a nice time capsule snapshot of the era, one you could sit down with and gaze in awe at how folks often put themselves into some ridiculous situations. And while you're at it, don't forget the astonishing gazpacho.

Steve Pulaski Paul Mazursky's Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice is a devilishly funny but wickedly thoughtful and contemplative film that shows a time period in America when what happened in the bedroom between a man and a woman didn't stay in the bedroom between a man and a woman. The newer generation taught us to be more open and thoughtful with our sexual desires, expressing them freely, and not restricting them as if sex was an unnatural thing. Connecting this to film, as I so often do, just look at how Americans have quietly been told to fear sex. A violent wartime epic can still achieve a PG-13 rating, while a three second shot of a vagina will stamp you film with the "kiss of death" NC-17 rating. How have our private parts been so private we've resorted to embracing the unnatural and the cruel and fearing the natural and the serene? Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice was made in 1969, right on the teetering edge of the hippie movement and during the "free love" movement, where marriage was seen as a restraint on ones well-being and pocketbook and the state had no business in dealing with it. The film, judging by its premise, deals with the concept of swinging or "wife-swapping," when it in turn, deals with the ethics and moral values that get in the way of doing such acts. We explore the lives of two couples, ostensibly similar on the surface, but royally different when examined. The couples are Bob and Carol Sanders (Robert Culp and Natalie Wood), a trendier, more liberal couple, while Ted and Alice Henderson (Elliott Gould and Dyan Cannon) are your more straight-shooting, square couple, highly indicative of the parents of sexually promiscuous teens in the 1960's and 1970's trying to understand their teenage sons and daughters.Bob and Carol spend a weekend at a couples retreat, one of those camps that allows for emotional honesty between married people to flow and allow for deeper feelings and emotions to penetrate one another. Because of the impact this has had on them, Bob reveals to Carol that while working on a film set he slept with another woman in an act he called "purely physical" and not emotional. Carol accepts this about as well as a wife could, believing Bob, admiring his honesty, and carrying on her own way, even casually revealing it to their best friends Ted and Alice, who are appalled at the thought. Alice finds herself especially sick with the idea that Bob could do such a thing and then reveal it to Carol who isn't the least bit upset with him. Damn western hippies, I tell you.This prompts Ted and Alice to have a lengthy nighttime conversation about the affair, the impact it could have on their friends in the long term, and if they themselves are sexually promiscuous at all. This is one of the many great talks in the film, focusing sharply on human emotion and feelings, two things often traded in American cinema for punchlines and vulgarity. In this conversation, Mazursky leaves the camera turned on the couple for a long period of time, listening to the conversation, hearing what both has to say, and leaving us with a lot to contemplate by the end of talk, whether we're single or married.These kinds of dialogs that go on for a while and leave the view in a self-contemplative state are fiercely common in Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, including the nudging idea of "is it possible for a couple to be married for a lifetime and not have sexual feelings for another women, be them expressed or regressed?" Throughout his career, Mazursky has been interested in character, marriages, the arguments and debates that a husband and wife have, but most importantly, relationships. When I say "relationships," I don't mean those confined to a marital or dating relationship but various relationships people can find themselves in.The actors here couldn't have been more perfect for their roles. We have the unbelievably gorgeous and beautifully mannered Natalie Wood in a role that requires impeccable conviction and plausibility, given the tender nature, Robert Culp in an equally uncomfortable but rewarding role, with Elliott Gould and Dyan Cannon assuming the role of the uppity parents trying to comprehend this "sexual openness" these couples speak of. All of these actors, equipped with Mazursky's and co-writer Larry Tucker's biting dialog, help illustrate the generation gap where sex is a revered act that should be kept on the down-low or sex is an act embraced and discussed.With Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, Mazursky and Tucker ask the biggest questions I've seen them ask yet. Is free love something to embrace or condemn? Is swinging, wife-swapping, or an orgy lethal to a marriage and its long-term prosperity in health? Is it healthy in itself to casually dismiss an affair or harp on it and risk losing the one you love? To show that these questions are still very much alive and the idea of sexual openness is still one discussed today, the modern-day film equivalent to Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice is Joe Swanberg's Drinking Buddies, a film that clearly is influenced by Mazursky's film right down to its poster. Both films explore the aforementioned ideas, only one takes a much younger cast and puts them to use while the other takes couples grappling with an older age and simply trying to fit in. Both films are two of my favorite romantic comedies to boot, as well.

tieman64 "Under the auspices of 'intimacy', we come to matrimony looking for everything that has so obviously deserted contemporary social relations: warmth, simplicity, truth, a life without theatre or spectator. But once the romantic high has passed, 'intimacy' strips itself bare: it is itself a social invention, it speaks the language of glamour magazines." - The Invisible Committee Ah, the sixties, the era when a director could make a film about sex orgies and have it feel like high art. Release a film like "Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice" today and it would feel tawdry and tasteless. Release it in the 1960s, though, and it'll fizzle with a certain authenticity.Directed by Paul Mazursky, who famously starred in Stanley Kubrick's "Fear and Desire", "Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice" stars Robert Culp and the always beautiful Natalie Wood as Bob and Carol, a married couple who find themselves at a New Age retreat. Here they learn to "be honest", "permissive" and "embrace indiscriminate sex". Our duo initially find this ethos liberating, embarking on a series of sexual encounters (with the always lovable Elliott Gould), until they realise that "maybe sex shouldn't be reduced to purely physical terms". The film ends with our heroes turning their backs to polygamy and orgies.Though Mazursky's film aptly sums up the confusion of the Eisenhower generation, who found themselves faced with the temptations of counterculture movements, many critics have accused it playing things too safe. The film's ending, in which Mazursky has "What the World Needs Now Is Love" croon over shots of walking couples, is typically read as a retreat to conservative values, heterosexual, monogamous intercourse and old fashioned appeals to authority and guilt.This kind of either/or battle has been going on forever. On one hand, for example, many argue that monogamous relationships and the institution of marriage perpetuate patriarchy, ownership and are rooted in capitalism (monogamy/marriage was partially constructed as a measure of power by patriarchal societies, so that men could ensure that their children were the rightful heirs to their property). In this regard, polyamory is seen as being liberating because it crushes certain ideas we have about ownership and the language we use around marriage and monogamy. Being in a non-monogamous situation, some argue, leads to sharing, greater honesty and allows people to be more autonomous.Another argument is that there is a relationship between war, aggression, and the control of sexuality, as many observers since the time of Freud have noted. Scholars such as Kinsey and Foucault also suspected that the more repressed a culture, the more violent and reactive it is. In contrast, when sexuality is unchallenged as part of the arc of life, there is less violence and more acceptance.Such "thought experiments" are common in science fiction literature. Ursula Le Guin's "The Left Hand of Darkness", for example, revolves around a race of aliens who are completely sexless. Because of their neutered state (and muted egos), they are not only entirely passive, but do not understand concepts such as "war" or even "progress". Indeed, their whole society has no drive to advance, innovate, renovate, conquer, or engage in games of dominance, class, acquisition, status, submission etc. Even their concept of time suggests stasis; on their planet, the current year is always called "year 0", and past years are retroactively re-named or re-numbered as time goes by to take into account a perpetual "present".Ironically, those who oppose polyamory do so for the same reasons as those who support it. For some, having multiple sexual partners is an extension of capitalist hedonism; one's sense of loyalty and control is overridden by the ego, which ceaselessly commands one to "enjoy", to cave to desires and accumulate or possess multiple mates. As desire represents a lack that can not be satisfied, the lover finds itself trapped in a neurotic cycle of acquisition; a slave to desire. These critics see polyamory as a form of greed, hedonism and perpetual dissatisfaction. But this is a misrepresentation of polygyny. Polyamory and promiscuity are not, at least in theory, the same thing.Then there are other arguments. Both capitalism and polygyny increase the variance in the distribution of desired outcomes (more partners/objects/commodities per person) while lowering the mean (less people with partners/objects/commodities). The mean number of children per man is exactly the same under polygyny and monogamy, but the proportion of men who have children is much greater under monogamy than under polygyny. In other words, more men are reproductively successful under monogamy than under polygyny. Ie - capitalism and polygyny are systems designed to reward the winners and punish the losers.On yet another hand, some stress that polyamory is "natural", and that it is only external (outside biology) factors which led to humans becoming monogamous (a couple can better provide for a child than a single parent etc). So why not embrace nature and breed like bunnies? Why not have multiple parents working in tandem? To counter this, some say what's natural is always contingent, so why not strive for a better, monogamous ideal, rather than indulging in rampant desires? To such people, monogamy is subversive in light of permissive norms. At which point those who advocate polyamory go to lengths to stress that it has nothing to do with sex or bedding many different people. If love is narcissism, and "true love" is excessive empathy, then why limit your 'excessive empathy' to just one person? Why not love everyone? Then, of course, the monogamous camp plays their trump card. If it's not about sexual intimacy, why not remove sex from polygyny altogether? At which point you're back with religion, and a kind of unconditional, Christ-like love; polyamory as the ultimate sexual Jesus.8.5/10 – Worth one viewing.