Peter Sellers made some great films during his long career (despite being a bit of a shit in real life) but I Love You, Alice B. Toklas! is distinctly a lesser Sellers. Sellers stars as a stuffy lawyer, sleepwalking his way to marriage and a staid suburban life but becomes tempted by a pretty hippy chick into dropping out and embracing an alternative lifestyle. Unfortunately this is 90 mins of cliche stitched together with a half hearted Sellers performance, some "groovy" music and a couple of pot based wig-out scenes worst of all it barely raised a smile, let alone a chuckle. A vapid, tepid Hollywood attempt to cash in - avoid.
A Safe Place, however, is the real deal, drenched as it is, in the LSD/experimental, counter culture of the era. A beautiful but troubled, young space cadet played by Tuesday Weld beguiles a square into a life of drugs, free love and mystical thinking and the pair's relationship blossoms despite the intervention of a predatory Jack Nicholson and the girl's persistent reminiscences of a tubby magician played by Orson Welles. Directed by Henry Jaglom, who edited Easy Rider & went onto direct Tracks, this is a tricky watch; the narrative is scattered and dream like and the script meandering and stuffed with the hippy burblings of the day. Nonetheless it's at least committed to it's cause and culminates in a strange ambiguous, bittersweet ending.
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