150 Word Review: 'Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice' (1969)

Opened marriage

Photo: Columbia Pictures

This bubbly boomer drama takes itself too seriously to be a comedy, and that self-seriousness is its primary charm in director and co-writer Paul Mazursky’s 1969 peek at a quartet of privileged Los Angelenos caught in the free-love current of the late sixties.

Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice opens on a groovy rendition of Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus as Bob and Carol drive a convertible into the California hills to attend a touchy-feely hippie retreat where their consciousness is expanded, and morals are challenged. By today’s standards, it’s a far-out and laugh-out-loud sequence, but in context it’s genuinely moving and intimate—they open up, man.

Robert Culp and Natalie Wood, as Bob and Carol, are credible hep cats exploring the boundaries of the new sexual revolution. Eliot, Gould, and Dyan Cannon are Ted and Alice, who are a little more high-strung. The ending is a cop-out. Is there an orgy?

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