Syl This film was quite revolutionary for the time period of 1969 about sexuality, marriage and fidelity. Two Los Angeles professional couples are Bob (Robert Culp) and Carol (Natalie Wood in a surprising role) and Ted (Elliott Gould) and Dyan Cannon (Alice) who spend the entire movie discussing sexuality and monogamy. The two couples are both attractive and successful and best friends with each other as well. The build-up scene for the foursome is quite developed and realistic. Both husbands have flings or one night stands while Alice is still a holdout for being faithful. The film begins with Bob and Carol at a new age institute common for the era. The film showed Los Angeles in the sixties as an up and coming city. They lead comfortable, successful lives but something seems missing . The surprise performance was Natalie Wood in her role.

Emil Bakkum The film Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice describes two married couples, who experiment with sexual attitudes, and finally end up together in bed for an orgy. The present-day morals see this narrative as offensive and shocking. Think about all those stains! However, it gets digestible, when the counter culture movement of the late sixties is taken into account. Hippies, the new left, and the humanistic psychology wanted to abolish all those morals, which seemed so oppressive and out of date. Everything is fantastic with a few more people. Collective action (communes!) was preferred over competition. Relations should be based on the free expression of emotions. Thus even parts of the middle class developed a liking for social experiments. Few, if any, conducts were deemed inappropriate. On the contrary, there seemed to be merit in them. And anyway, everybody looks funny naked. Against this background the film story is merely a voyage of discovery. It is even possible to chuckle about funny (or bizarre) scenes. Here are some: Carol pursues the waiter in a restaurant in order to express her gratitude. She praises the meatloaf. It was apple pie (joking). When Bob catches Carol for adultery in their own house, he presents a glass to his rival (Horst, the tennis Lehrer), and offers his extensive collection of whiskey marks. Drinking makes other people more interesting. Of course they smoke hashish. In bed Ted is frustrated when Alice rejects him. His efforts to engage in intercourse, even though she is not "in the mood", are hilarious. He fails, because the preservatives are all gone! She is evidently disturbed by the decay of morals, and visits a therapist. At the time even dogs had their own therapist. She tells that sometimes at home she walks about naked, and her son asked about her "titi" ("He is so sweet"). When in the end the two couples land in the same bed, they have clearly lost control. Here the film makers finally show their disapproval, and the orgy fails. It is simply a violation of human nature. Being a contemporary, I am still somehow mollified by this crazy abolishment of any taboo, but I can not remember why. I also acknowledge the slippery slope towards perversity and morbidity. Will the present youth loathe Bob and company?

NORDIC-2 After a weekend of emotionally charged encounter sessions at an Esalen- like retreat known as "The Institute," L.A.-based documentary filmmaker Bob Sanders (Robert Culp) and his wife Carol (Natalie Wood) become zealous acolytes of the late-Sixties, hippie-inspired cult of expressive individualism: an apolitical ideology of bourgeois hedonism that sanctifies joyful spontaneity, uninhibited candor, and guilt-free (extramarital) sex as the sine qua non of a fulfilling life. Adhering to the new openness, Bob confesses to Carol that he has had a "just physical" one-night stand with a 20-year-old blonde while on a business trip to San Francisco. Though seemingly sanguine about the news, Carol proceeds to have her own dalliance with Horst (Horst Ebersberg), her handsome tennis instructor, but is caught in the act when Bob comes home early from a trip to New York. After a bout with old-fashioned jealousy, Bob seems able to reconcile himself to Carol's infidelity. As for Bob and Carol's best friends—Ted (Elliott Gould) and Alice (Dyan Cannon)—this New Age ethos strikes them as suspiciously naive and self-indulgent until Ted succumbs to his own opportunity to cheat while on a trip to Miami. When he confesses his indiscretion to Alice while the foursome is on vacation in Las Vegas, Alice calls everyone's bluff by stripping down to her underwear and suggesting the two couples have a spouse-swapping orgy in their hotel suite before going to a Tony Bennett concert! Supposedly dutiful swingers all, the four climb into bed and commence foreplay with each other's spouse but come to find that they cannot go through with it; evidently, primal taboos surrounding conjugal intimacy are too strong to overcome. In the somewhat surreal denouement, a chastened Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice march out of their casino hotel, followed by a long string of other hand holding couples and promenade in the parking lot to the lilting strains of Jackie DeShannon singing Bert Bacharach's "What the World Needs Now is Love." The ending, and the movie as a whole, is tonally ambiguous. Are viewers meant to applaud or sneer at the triumph of conventional morality over revolutionary sexual-emotional mores? Probably more the former but the film still manages to raise questions about status quo hypocrisy that it cannot put to bed peacefully. Made for a mere $2 million, 'Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice' was a smash hit, earning $30 million at the box office. A watered-down TV series based on the film lasted only half a season in the autumn of 1973. VHS (1996) and DVD (2004).

wes-connors In Southern California, documentary filmmaker Robert Culp (as Bob Sanders) and his beautiful wife Natalie Wood (as Carol) participate in group sensitivity for research. They meditate and get in touch with inner feelings; they stare at each other, hit pillows and cry. The experience enlightens our co-stars, and Mr. Culp later reveals he had a one night stand in San Francisco. This leads Ms. Wood to consider hitting the rackets with a tennis instructor. Wood and Culp share sexual feelings with each other and best friends Elliott Gould and Dyan Cannon (as Ted and Alice Henderson) come into the bed...Though considered by many to be very 1960s, sessions like the one in the opening are used today to "bond" workers in new employment situations; however, the cigarette smokers and topless women are not in evidence. The swinging sixties weren't easy to capture in films, as most of the movies trying to reflect the times seem silly; moreover, they usually presented through the eyes of personnel older than hippie age. "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice" is really only a hesitating tease, and consequently works better than some contemporary fare. Most obviously, Natalie Wood is sexy and stupendous.******* Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (9/17/69) Paul Mazursky ~ Natalie Wood, Robert Culp, Elliott Gould, Dyan Cannon