Highly Overrated But Still Good

best movie i've ever seen.

Admirable film.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

This movie essentially begins with an attractive high school student named "Candy Christian" (Ewa Aulin) being caught in a compromising position due in large part to her innocent and trusting nature. Additionally, her good looks also had much to do with this as well. Be that as it may, each scenario in this movie has a least one character with just one sole purpose in mind—to get her between the proverbial sheets. And their desire to do so is limited only by the imaginative position that they find themselves faced with. Now as far as this movie is concerned it certainly had its share of major actors to include Marlon Brando (as the Eastern mystic named "Grindl"), Richard Burton ("MacPhisto"), Walter Matthau ("General R. A. Smight") and James Coburn ("Dr. A. B. Krankheit"). So fans of any of these fine actors should be pleased. On the other hand, this film is definitely dated to a certain period in American history that celebrated "psychedelic" movies of this type. Because of that, younger audiences may not be able to appreciate it as much as those who experienced this particular time. That said, while I thought it was somewhat entertaining for the most part, it also seemed more than a little uneven and I have rated it accordingly. Slightly above average.

I guess I simply missed the humor in this "Supposed" spoof of the 60s and the military. (I have to say Austin Powers (Another spoof) is Jason Bourne compared to this movie). This film stands out as an all-time baddie, without a single redeeming factor about it. The worst part of this is the waste of the cast. I cannot imagine how you can possibly put Marlon Brando, Richard Burton, James Coburn, Walter Matthau, Elsa Martinelli and John Huston in a film and fail? This certainly does and it starts with a script that is so stupid I would sooner watch a marathon of Sponge Bob square pants. The main character Candy (Ewa Aulin) wanders through this film like she is basically stoned, and you could watch a porn film and find a wider degree of expressions on someone's face (Basically she makes Jenna Jameson look like Meryl Streep). Burton as a stupid poet named McPhisto (Which I guess is a takeoff on Dylan Thomas) comes out worst of all, it is by far and away the worst film he ever made, and Matthau as a General is not much better (And as a major comic actor should have known better)). I have seen films its compared to such "The Magic Christian" and "Casino Royale" (Sellers version) and they are better than this turkey. This film is without question the greatest waste of talent in motion picture history (Brando, Coburn, Matthau & Huston FOUR Oscar WINNERS (Burton nominated 7 times)), and thus belongs in my 10 All-Time worst film list (Not quite "Machete" or "Walk On The Wild Side" but pretty damn close). Essentially it warrants zero stars.

When I first saw this, on its release, I laughed until I thought I'd pop a gut. I didn't laugh so much this time around but then I don't laugh as much as I used to -- at anything.But look at that cast: Burton, Huston, Brando, Aznavour, Coburn, Pallenberg, Matthau, among others. And some talent behind the camera as well.It's easy to dismiss this as just one more disorganized non sequitur from the 1960s, chaos trying to pass for art, but it's really more serious than that. I suppose "serious", in that context, should be in quotation marks. Yes, it's a kaleidoscopic jumble but there's an uncanny continuity underneath the overt narrative. The novel, after all, was written by Terry Southern, who gave us "Doctor Strangelove" among other satirical works of the 1960s. Some of his send ups are more whimsical than others but they're hardly pointless.Among the targets skewered here: the reverence in which high-echelon surgeons are held (and in which they hold themselves); the American propensity to protect itself and the rest of the world by military intervention; the charisma of alcoholic poets (I think Southern missed the boat on that one, at least as far as American students are concerned); the crypto-mysticism of Eastern philosophy so fashionable in the 60s; the nouvelle vague films that flooded the art houses; gay bars in Greenwich Village; the longing that some Irish cops have to bust heads over what they perceive as "infractions"; the Circum-Mediterranean virginity mystique; and the patronizing and politically correct attitude towards the disabled and deformed.Southern's novel (I don't know who Mason Hoffenberg is, but I can't find any trace of him in the book) is funnier than the movie, and sexier too. For whatever reasons, it's difficult to transpose Southern's written work to the screen. "The Magic Christian," a story with enormous wit, flopped as a movie. But when it's Southern who's writing the adaptation, the movies generally turn out pretty well -- "The Loved One," for instance, which did a good job of capturing some of Evelyn Waugh's humor while adding some absurdities of Southern's own. That movie introduced us to the word "PRE-vert." Here, the narrative explores and explodes some of the most primitive verities of the Western world in the 1960s, not all with equal success. And sometimes director Marquand goes over the top with the special effects. John Astin doesn't really belong in the movie. The other principal actors seem to know the meaning of debauchery but Astin works too hard at hipness, only to achieve hepness. Ringo Starr isn't an actor. Too bad all the performances weren't up to the level of the short guy who played the blue-eyed eager Irish cop (Joey Forman?).It's not a masterpiece and some episodes are more amusing than others but, then, what is perfection? A petty illusion of the material world, unworthy of definition, as Marlon Brando's phony guru might put it, a complete ascetic when he's not secretly gobbling down salami and beer. It's colorful. It's funny. It features the calf-like eyes and robust figure of Miss Teenage Sweden. What more can you ask for -- a return to the innocence of the early 1960s?

For some reason I thought Tom Stoppard had a hand in it, but I was thinking of Terry Southern. Isn't that interesting? My memories of the film, which was played over and over again on the closed-circuit television network of the USS Forrestal during my 1974 Mediterranean cruise, were two: Richard Burton hoovering booze from the floor of his limo and Walter Matthau approaching Candy for sex in the cockpit of a military transport (this scene was repeated in Private Benjamin with Goldie Hawn). I vaguely remember Candy having sex with her comatose father, the appearance of Ringo Starr, and not much else. It's the kind of episodic story that functioned as porn in the late 60s--writers of porn didn't know how to built to a payoff, so they wrote a sex scene, moved the character to another situation, had another sex scene, and so forth (get a copy of The Devil in Miss Jones to see how it works, or Story of O, or Deep Throat, or anything of that era). Is there anything deeper to be seen in this movie? I really doubt it--it looks like a potboiler by a guy who has some bills. I don't have a clue how he got the stars to appear in it, but I'm sure Peter Sellers had a lot to do with that. And it's a gorgeous enough movie--the star is heartbreakingly beautiful and nubile; the sets are decorated with care. Terry's rep was looming pretty large with his Strangelove credit, too, so pretty much anything he ground out was bound to be printed and filmed. Whenever anyone wants to break out of short stories into novels, I advise them to follow this formula--write a series of related sex scenes. Write one a week for a year. Anyone can crank that much out. After a year, shuffle them and send them to an agent. Wait for the checks to come rolling in. What I don't get is why anyone would write about anything other than sex. It's all we care about as a species--having it, resisting it, trying not to think about it, trying to get it up, trying to keep it down, trying to get other people into bed, trying to get other people out of bed. Everything else is just window dressing. Candy is an important movie because it doesn't pretend anything else is important besides falling between the knees of a beautiful, nubile, not particularly bright young woman.