Very Cool!!!

Admirable film.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

I saw this movie when it first came out in the late sixties and I've enjoyed watching Liza Minnelli on Youtube in scenes from it since. It's a movie that always made me feel sad. I was in college missing a girlfriend back home and the Sandpiper's nostalgic song "Come Saturday Morning" brought tears to my eyes, as did the neediness of the Pookie character who I suppose reminded me a bit of my girlfriend (or me?)..."Come Saturday morning I'm going' away with my friend We'll Saturday-spend till the end of the day Just I and my friend We'll travel for miles in our Saturday smiles And then we'll move on But we will remember long after Saturday's gone."It's a fabulous reminder of what it's like to lonely love starved college student.

I first saw The Sterile Cuckoo my first year in college when I was the same age as the characters. It hit home then but it took 40 years for me to realize the depth and beauty of this simple story of a lost and lonely college freshman girl who tries too hard and a straight-laced college freshman lad. From the opening, this story grabbed my heart and just would not let go. The sound track of Come Saturday Morning by the Sandpipers will echo in my soul for a long long time. The opening of the older, widowed father sending his little girl off to college, wanting just a touch of warmth from her and getting nothing. And then the bittersweet story of Pookie Adams finding her first love and Jerry who was dragged unwillingly into his own first love, discovering each other and the joy and pain, until finally they grow apart. The last scene of this lost and lonely little girl back on the bus with no place to go and no one to love her, her first love standing there with his hands in his pockets watching her go. My heart ripped in pieces. Yes, Pookie was just about as unlikeable as they come but her vulnerability makes you want to hold her close just like Jerry did. I have no idea why Liza Minelli did not win the Oscar in this her first movie. She certainly should have. Yes, the movie has some anachronisms that the young audience of today might find amusing, like dial telephones, but this is a one of a kind experience I would recommend to all.

Not the kind of movie a male teen {13} would go see, much less really enjoy. I think it was the second or b movie of that 1969 Saturday matinee. The theme has a special catchy quality about it, like Lizas character, I found it very enjoyable, with eccentric humor & sadness all working in a well balanced entertaining film.

Liza Minelli plays neurotic "Pookie" who falls in love with a conservative, bookish college freshmen whom she meets riding a bus. And how neurotic (and irritating) she is!! Her schtick is to act out outrageous pranks in order to grab his attention (like sitting cross-legged on his roof). The theme to the movie, "Come Saturday Morning", sung by the Sandpipers on massive doses of seconal, plays repetitively in the background of this movie. Liza is an overbearing misfit, who clings to her serious, no-nonsense boyfriend like the lingering smell of nauseating incense after it has been burning in a room. In a long and painful monologue over the phone-- a tour-de-force for Liza Minelli--she begs him to let her come and spend time with him alone in his college dorm room. Boyfriend Burton is the "strong, silent type."When she shows up, her boyfriend totally ignores her and instead they spend the days in nerve wracking silence. One is therefore led to believe that Burton the boyfriend felt compelled out of sympathy and compassion to let her stay. Poor Pookie--she plays every trick in the book to grab his attention but to no avail. While he studies, she asks him--suggestively--if he "wants to peel a tomatoe?" She serves him lunch and pours him soda out of a bottle with a three foot long neck. She has masking tape over her mouth(get the picture?). To the viewer, this either creates sympathy for her character or you find her pranks irritating--why doesn't she just go away and leave him alone so he can study? You never really know if her schtick irritates or amuses him, or if he just stoically accepts it. In as much as they don't seem to really "connect"--(or really communicate well, is what the director is trying to convey here) he suggests that they spend some time apart, oh, say three months-- before they contact each other again. She agrees, one assumes--because she doesn't protest; she just nods and drives off. When she drives off in her Volkswagen, the viewing audience can't help but breathe a sigh of relief. (Gee, is this called letting someone down "gently"?) One would naturally expect this to be the logical "ending" to this movie, (Sandpiper's theme playing in the background) but it isn't. Inexplicably, Burton's character spends the rest of the picture trying to locate her! After the complete lack of chemistry between the two, one has to wonder: "why would he want to?" Perhaps Pookie's kind of like someone who hangs around and you take for granted, and then, when they're gone, you finally notice them missing, or begin to miss them, anyways. Or maybe he needs someone to cook and wash his clothes for him while he studies.