RE:VIEW ~ “Candy” (1968)
I have no idea why or how this film came to my attention. More to the point, I have no idea why I devoted one hour and forty minutes of my life to the viewing of it in its edited form; and then devoted another twenty minutes locating a version with the excised material and skimmed those sections to see if I missed anything which would change my view of the piece (it did not).
Perhaps it was that the cast includes five Oscar® winners: Marlon Brando, James Coburn, Walter Matthau, Sir Ringo Starr, and John Huston; as well as the Academy Award® nominee Richard Burton. It also stars Charles Aznavour, Walter Matthau; and then popular figures such as Sugar Ray Robinson and Anita Pallenberg.
It’s possible that I saw all of that and then was swayed by the fact that it had a screenplay by the Oscar® nominee Buck Henry (for the screenplay of The Graduate and direction of Heaven Can Wait); or that he was adapting the 1958 novel of the same name written by Terry Southern (who worked on Dr. Strangelove, The Cincinnati Kid, The Magic Christian, and Easy Rider) and Mason Hoffenberg.
It is entirely possible to have all of that talent and skill involved in the same project and still create such a massive artistic disaster that is so bad it’s not even good enough to laugh at the failure of.
This is that film.
It is supposed to be a sex farce in the style of Candide, La Ronde, or La Puce à l’oreille. What we get instead is something which fails to reach even the sophistication of anything in the Porky’s franchise (there’s FOUR of the damned things!), Revenge of the Nerds, or Weird Science. There is no sense of social satire here, no commenting thematically on the hypocrisy of class structures, or authority’s proscriptions of the actions of others whilst ignoring their own entirely.
It goes without saying that Marlon Brando playing an Indian Guru of some sort, in brown face, with a very thin accent, is Just Plain Wrong. Add to that Sir Ringo’s portrayal of a Mexican-American landscape gardener using an accent with a surprisingly Caribbean origin, and you get a sense of how far off the aim of this picture is.
The sets are often badly made, the cinematography is less than interesting (except possibly the hospital operating theatre scene), the dialogue is poorly constructed, the acting is almost universally over the top (far beyond even a winking, outré degree where we are let in on the joke that the actors know what they’re doing); and the editing lingers far too long on highly confusing sequences which add little to the action.
What makes all of this even worse is that the sweet, young, titular heroine is still in high school during the story. This means that the men who are having physical relations with her are doing so with someone legally underage; Sir Ringo is the most appropriate at 28 years of age.
This isn’t sensual enough to be arousing, not funny enough to be amusing, and not well-enough made to be worth viewing.
Avoid this at all cost to yourself.
★☆☆☆☆