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TCM will be highlighting films by Ann-Margret this Thursday. The memory of her basking in a spray of beans and chocolate as she then makes love to a man-sized, hotdog-shaped pillow are so well-seared into any young stoner’s mind that I was tempted to write about Tommy (Ken Russell, 1975). However there is something in the air right now that pointed me, instead, toward Carnal Knowledge (Mike Nichols, 1971). It has to do with a perennial hot-button topic that will never go away as long as humans are around, be it Elvis’ gyrating hips in 1957 or whatever Miley Cyrus is licking right now: Sex. Trainwreck (Judd Apatow, 2015), for example, is currently well on its way toward raking in over $100 million and is getting a lot of ink for Amy Schumer’s portrayal of a sexually liberated woman who grows up thinking monogamy isn’t realistic. It would be nice to think that we’ve come a long way since Looking for Mr. Goodbar (Richard Brooks, 1977), which portrayed the drama of a free-spirited and promiscuous woman (Diane Keaton) as a slippery slope into inevitable tragedy. But it was scarcely two weeks ago that a deranged religious extremist with a gun in Lafayette, Louisiana, picked a screening of Trainwreck for an act of terrorism.
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Clik here to view.
When Carnal Knowledge was released it was banned in Georgia as being “pornographic.” To some extent, I get it. Because “it” is right there in the title. “Carnal knowledge” is the Biblical euphemism for sexual intercourse. You might as well splash the marquee with the word “SEX!” And the story is, indeed, about sex, but not in the radical way that puritans might fear. The story follows two lifelong friends, Jonathan (Jack Nicholson) and Sandy (Arthur “Art” Garfunkel) over the course of 25 years. It starts in the late 40s when they lose their virginity in college and goes onwards through to their middle-age. Jonathan is reluctant to get married and racks up as many sexual conquests as possible, while Sandy gets married and starts a family. It doesn’t end there, things to get more complicated, and by the time 1970 rolls around and Jonathan and Sandy reflect back on their life well, there’s a deep sadness to the proceedings that I won’t give away. Not Looking for Mr. Goodbar sad, but the darkness is definitely there.
Ann-Margret plays Bobbie, Jonathan’s love-interest in the film, and she beat out Jane Fonda, Raquel Welch, and Natalie Wood for the part. She comes in later, and the first act belongs to Candice Bergen in a role that she later claimed as the one she was “proudest to be in.” All the performances across the board are strong and singular, with Nicholson’s flying rages nicely tempered by Garfunkel’s more melancholic and introspective demeanor. Mike Nichols, who passed away last year, was at this time in an early bloom that had quickly established him as the director of smart and adult movies. The three features that preceded Carnal Knowledge were Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), The Graduate (1967), and Catch-22 (1970). Nobody can claim Nichols didn’t strike while the iron was hot.
Carnal Knowledge was written by Jules Feiffer from his unproduced play. He later won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning in The Village Voice, and has written over 35 books, plays, and screenplays. Carnal Knowledge did eventually make it to the stage as originally intended for a 1990 off-Broadway run. While there are many elements to the film that remind the viewer of its origins as a stage play, Nichols’ camera placement always feels cinematic and daring. Instead of the standard-two shot arrangement, the characters often speak directly to the camera, with attention to symmetry that seems to be ripped out of Kubrick’s playbook. Although after seeing Nicholson raging through a bedroom as he terrorizes Ann-Margret in Carnal Knowledge, perhaps it can also be said that Kubrick ripped out a page from Nichols’ playbook, especially in lieu of a slightly more cheerful scene when Nicholson looks at Ann-Margret and says: “Here’s Bobbie! My first wife!” The way Nicholson says those first two words clearly foreshadow his more famous “Here’s Johnny!” later on in The Shining.
I’ll refrain from a longer digression on the topics of sex and horror and simply remind readers that, as much as religious extremists view various film titles as a threat to their status-quo, these films are often anything but that. Trainwreck starts out with a radical premise, but by the third act the reliable tropes of the romantic comedy remain largely unchallenged. Carnal Knowledge, though billed as a comedy-drama, is really mostly a drama whose controversial subject promised a look at alternatives to monogamy and it delivers roll-call of “ball-busting” disappointment in the final reel that is far from a singing endorsement for said lifestyle.
From what I can tell, the most radical contribution Carnal Knowledge made to popular culture can be found in the following awkwardly (but hilariously) worded IMDB trivia note: “The scene in which Sandy takes out a condom while in bed with Susan was the very first time a condom was ever shown onscreen, all over Earth.” All over Earth! Religious extremists who consider marriage and procreation pillars to their faith can take comfort in knowing that this flagrant globe-covering advertisement for contraception back in the early 70s did very little to keep the world population from soaring past the 7 billion mark, as can be witnessed here in real-time:
http://www.census.gov/popclock/
In case that’s depressing, here’s Ann-Margret to cheer you up: