Terry Southern's Candy

      Candy, based on a novel by Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg, works well as a 1968 vision of reality upset and jumbled by the era's drug taking.

     The movie is LSD, is grass, is Ecstasy.  Beautifully colored, shaded, filmed with whimsical set pieces and surprise guest appearances by major stars, the film follows a Blonde young woman, Candy, through a series of strange episodes each centered around a famous (fictional) person.

     First we see a poetry reading by a poet superstar played by a frizzy-haired Richard Burton, his voice uttering absurd megalomaniacal words, commanding the attention of a roomful of college students, the women fainting and, no doubt, dampening their panties.  Candy watches, he sees her and from that moment on he can think only of fucking her.

     He gives her a ride home in his limo, driver separated by glass as the Poet intones the word "need" over and over again, insisting on the fulfillment of this need.  Is this a parody of the era's wanting-everything-now worldview?  Indulging pleasures was a popular thing in 1968, in 1969, in 2020 for that matter, but here we have, in Burton's poet, a sybarite.  

     What is a sybarite?  I'm glad you asked.

     Sybarite, dictionary definition, "a person who is self-indulgent in their fondness for sensuous luxury."

     This pleasure-indulgent man tries to fuck Candy on the car's backseat.  "Need!  Need!"

     His driver opens the door and announces they've arrived at Candy's parents' house.  She breaks free, but bears him no hostility.  Throughout the film, Candy blithely accepts the sex coming her way most of the time.  Walter Matthau tries to fuck her.  He plays the leader of a platoon of paratroopers aloft in the sky all the time, with the men doing shifts of weeks while Matthau has been on the plane for six years, hasn't seen a woman until Candy arrived.

     He just wants to look at her naked body, will presumably take care of himself, as he's probably been doing for six years straight.  I can't remember what happens after that.

     The operation sequence is the best part of Candy.  James Coburn plays a hilarious physician character.  He, like the Poet, is a superstar.  He's a Surgeon of the brain.  Everything he does is precise.  Every word he speaks cuts with meaning.  He's a practiced performer.  His stern but hilarious demeanor makes the operation scene one of the funniest set pieces I've ever seen.

     Coburn is all over the place and tightly controlled.  This is not the relaxed Coburn, the cool Coburn of The Carey Treatment.  This is a grandiloquent maniac, a surgeon of special gifts, but not the gift of tact.

     The operation scene.  Just watch the movie.

     Ringo Starr plays a Mexican gardener.  Need an actor for a Mexican character?  Find a British guy.

     His purpose in the film wasn't clear to me.  Marlon Brando makes an appearance as a guru being driven around the country in a truck's long bed trailer.  He becomes Candy's teacher.  In one scene they have sex for hours in a number of increasingly preposterous positions.  Brando plays the role evenly, not much affect in his voice or expression.

     Candy (played by a blonde luscious woman named Ewa Aulin) breezes through, unaffected by the harsh currents of unreality just experienced.  Throughout, there's something mad going on here.  This is not meant to be a utopian vision.  It's absurdity plus humanism, mixed with social satire; the medical profession, the military, and sexual and spiritual quests all come across as absurd.

     To Candy, things happen to her.  She isn't the agent of any action.  A slow-moving asteroid approaches, that's what she's like; she just is.

     Men, of course, behave badly when they see her.  They take advantage of her.  She allows them to do it because she appears to know no way of staving them off.

     Ewa Aulin (Candy), her body is splendid.  Her acting?  Not so good.

     I write this without benefit of the reference IMDB.  I wanted to try not relying on any other sources, although I did look up a word.

     Cinema is a literary experience.

Vic Neptune