Petulia

The way Petulia holds Archie's hand in the elevator changes between shots.

Archie folds his arms when Petulia shows up with the tuba, but in next cut, arms are down.

George C. Scott and Julie Christie star in this mega-unusual film.

Roger Ebert loved it, Pauline Kael hated it. Great performances from George C Scott (one of his finest), the absolutely stunning Ms Christie, Ms Shirley Knight (one of her best alongside As Good as It Gets, though I have yet to catch up with her acclaimed work in Dutchman) and a top notch one from Joseph Cotten.

Although I wouldn't say this film is actually enjoyable, it does give a good feel for life in the 60's - at a certain level at least.From topless bars to the TVs crackling away in the background about the war in Vietnam, "Petulia" has plenty of incidental detail of the mid-60s.

In many ways, this is a plot less, jumble of the movie, but at the same time there is something really fantastic about it, and some movies are better off jumbled up cause its fitting, never more so than in the case of "Petulia." George C.

I could not give a wide range recommendation for this film. If you don't like abrupt flashback edits and a story that unfolds slowly, then this is not for you.

1968 was a remarkable year in the history of cinema. Films as Pasolini's "Teorema", Anderson's "if....

Bold and innovative in its use of flashbacks, ellipses, and, most uniquely, flash-forwards - probably the first use of that technique in mainstream narrative film - Petulia (1968) tells the powerful story of two disintegrating marriages and the flowering of a love affair set against the backdrop of the Viet Nam war (waged on television screens), a potent counterpoint to the emotional chaos and violence in the characters' lives. This Richard Lester masterwork is an amazing and continuously fascinating fracturing of narrative structure that simultaneously succeeds in maintaining a clear and forward momentum to culminate in an emotionally and intellectually satisfying catharsis.

What, exactly, makes Petulia such a great movie?Is it the ravishing Julie Christie, who never seemed more appropriately out-of-place?

Julie Christie parades her proletariat pout through 2 hours of psychedelic pretensions, all of which are seemingly supposed to suggest great profundity and hidden meaning--but don't be fooled--this is an empty parcel wrapped in glittering paper, with a core as resoundingly vacuous as the society it attempts to depict.The story, (such as it is) concerns a chic young woman (Miss Christie as "Petulia") who picks up children and middle aged men with casual indifference to convention, because she's "kooky" (recall that our anti-heroine here inherits this voguish characteristic from her cinematic sisters in "Georgy Girl," "Darling" and anything with Sandy Duncan).