USA comedy
1971
color 96 min.
Director: Mike Nichols
CLV: $49.95 - available
           1 disc, catalog # CC1275L
Carnal Knowledge
is about sex.No, actually, that's not entirely right.
Carnal
Knowledge is really about sex without relationships, and sex without
eroticism -- these are the subjects of Jules Feiffer's screenplay, and all that
the four main characters, portrayed by Jack Nicholson, Art Garfunkel, Candice
Bergen, and Ann-Margret, ever interact over. In 1971, when the newly liberated
cinema was reveling in idyllic coital and near-coital interludes, Carnal
Knowledge was an incredibly daring, prophetic, successful and controversial
film, no mean feat when one considers that both A Clockwork Orange and
Straw Dogs were in release that same year.
Those movies stirred
widespread debate about violence, but Mike Nichols hit closer to home with
Carnal Knowledge. It upset people about their lives, loves, and lovers --
women hated it and Carnal Knowledge made men more defensive about
sexuality than any movie in memory.
The movie's success was reminiscent of
Nichols' The Graduate, on a more sophisticated level. Indeed, Carnal
Knowledge owed something to the earlier film -- Jules Feiffer's script seemed
to draw from a single, haunting nuance of The Graduate's final scene: Ben
and Elaine, united and riding off together, their expressions suffused with
agonizing loneliness and doubt. If The Graduate encapsulated the sexual
ethos of the 1960s, Carnal Knowledge was a film for the 1970s, the rude
awakening following sexual awakening.
In place of Ben Braddock, Carnal
Knowledge gives us Jonathan (Jack Nicholson) and Sandy (Art Garfunkel), two
Amherst students from the 1940s, whose sexual exploits and ineptitudes mask
deeper problems: Jonathan's inability to relate to women as anything other than
sex objects, and Sandy's incapability of relating to women on anything other than
an intellectual level. Into their midst comes Susan (Candice Bergen), a coed who
fulfills their limited but ferocious sexual needs and eventually marries Sandy.
Twenty years go by, and Sandy is divorced, while Jonathan marries Bobbie
(Ann-Margret), an actress whose sole attraction for him is physical. Ultimately,
Sandy is left with a teenaged companion (Carol Kane) with whom he can barely
communicate, while Jonathan finds solace in reviewing his conquests in between
trysts with a prostitute (Rita Moreno), finally arriving at a self-deriding
conclusion about life and love: "Maybe schmuckdom is what you need to stay young
and open."
Nichols' treatment of the script is stagey, but also extremely
cinematic. The action is depicted almost entirely in tight and medium shots, but
also makes use of some very sophisticated sound and visual edits, overlapping
dialogue and picture from adjoining sections in a manner reminiscent of the best
moments of The Graduate.
In his first major film following his rise to
stardom in the relatively modestly conceived Easy Rider and Five Easy
Pieces, Nicholson gives a ferocious performance as the sexually obsessed,
erotically vapid Jonathan, seeking out, using, and casting aside his sexual
partners with an abandon that anticipates his devil in The Witches of
Eastwick and his Joker in Batman.
Art Garfunkel's affecting
performance as Sandy was one of the movie's most unexpected virtues. Garfunkel
was trying to prove himself as an actor, after six years as one half of the most
successful singing duet in music history. His first contact with Nichols had been
through the Simon and Garfunkel music used in The Graduate, and he had
played Nately, the innocent Air Force officer in Nichols' adaptation of Joseph
Heller's Catch-22. His Sandy is a perfect foil for Nicholson's Jonathan, an
all-too-aware and conflicted male presence.
Despite the anger with which many
feminists greeted Carnal Knowledge, the movie offered two juicy female
roles. Candice Bergen had been playing supporting parts in Hollywood beginning
with The Group in 1966, but Carnal Knowledge was the first picture
in which critics and audiences focused on her acting ability -- her gentle,
sophisticated-but-conflicted Susan is the most affecting figure in the film, and
the one with whom audiences identified the most easily, and very much humanized
the movie.
Ann-Margret had started her screen career as a teen sex-kitten, a
kind of American Brigitte Bardot, but until Carnal Knowledge she wasn't
taken seriously as an actress. Nichols' film earned her an Academy Award
nomination as Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of Bobbie, Jonathan's
discarded sexual partner.
None of these accolades shielded Carnal
Knowledge from controversy, however -- late in 1971, an Athens, Georgia
theater owner named Billy Jenkins was convicted of pandering to prurient interest
by showing Carnal Knowledge. The Georgia Supreme Court upheld the
conviction and the case eventually worked its way up to the United States Supreme
Court, which reversed the Georgia courts in a landmark 1974 ruling.
Carnal
Knowledge is a purer work of cinema than The Graduate -- without the
inclusion of any extraneous detail. Not coincidentally, it was the first film
that Nichols produced as well as directed, and it had the added advantage of
having been adapted from a play that had never been produced. This left him free
to treat it in a manner completely suited to the cinema. In spite of its intense
emotional impact, Carnal Knowledge ran a mere 96 minutes, and the only
major complaint that critics and audiences alike had was that it was over too
quickly. As Vincent Canby of the New York Times put it, in a headline, no less,
"I was sorry to see it end."
-- BRUCE EDER
Credits
Produced
and Directed by: Mike Nichols
Executive Producer: Joseph E.
Levine
Screenplay: Jules Feiffer
Cinematography: Giuseppe Rotunno
A.S.C.
Editor: Sam O'Steen
Assistant Director: Tim Zinnemann
Assistant
Producer: Clive Reed
Production Designer: Richard Sylbert
Art Director:
Robert Luthardt
Production Manager: Joe L.
Cramer
Transfer
This edition of Carnal
Knowledge was transferred digitally from a low contrast 35mm print made from
the original negative, in its correct widescreen Panavision aspect ratio of
2.35:1. The soundtrack was mastered from a 35mm magnetic track, with the unmixed
music-and-effects track isolated on one analog channel.