Petulia (1968)
Petulia is director Richard Lester’s dark farewell to the swinging sixties, an era whose sensibility he had helped define with his famous Beatles movies, A Hard Day’s Night and Help. Petulia was filmed in San Francisco and entailed the ex pat Lester’s first return to the States in many years. Lester portrays a Summer of Love already turned rotten, California’s self-regarding tan peeling away to reveal the skull beneath. It’s fitting that the heroin casualty Janis Joplin appears in the opening scene.
Cinematographer Nicolas Roeg serves up breathtaking formal gorgeousness—a Californian housing tract, an all-night supermarket—that always feels sinister, brutal, or inhuman as an IBM computer panel from the time. This is the California of Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49, published in 1965. Lester’s minor characters often seem like automatons: selling hospital supplies, watching an ambulance cart away a victim. In the hospital rooms there are hollow televisions that don’t work, mere advertisements for ones that do.
The title character, played by Julie Christie, is a Free Spirit, cut from the same cloth as Sally Bowles and Holly Golightly. “I’ve been married six months and I’ve never had an affair,” she announces to Archie Bollen (George C. Scott), a successful doctor she accosts at a party, telling him that he is her chosen quarry. She stalks him, showing her affection by, for instance, turning up at his apartment at five in the morning to serenade him with a tuba.
Like most Free Spirits, Petulia is desperately unhappy. She is the ongoing victim of her husband’s physical abuse (Richard Chamberlain is the enigmatic, frightening husband), and capable of no small amount of cruelty herself.
The film is based on the 1966 novel Me and the Arch-Kook Petulia by the talented if now forgotten John Haase (1923-2006). Born in Germany, Haase and his parents—his mother was Jewish—fled to the United States a few years after Hitler came to power. Haase found success both as a writer—another of his novels was made into the film Dear Brigitte with James Stewart, and his occasional pieces appeared in the New Yorker—and a dentist to the stars in Hollywood. The Los Angeles Times obituary mentions that Van Halen performed at his wedding to his second wife in 1975.
Haase disliked Lester’s film adaptation while Lester thought Haase’s novel “a book that seemed totally wrong.” This is funny since both movie and book are quite good and neither all that far in sensibility from the other. Key to both is that while they appear to focus on Petulia (as their titles suggest) they are fundamentally about Archie, and about the sorrow and bewilderment of divorce.
This is more overt in Haase’s novel. After having left his marriage, Archie tries to salve or at least dull his conscience with work, but finds himself at the end of the day in his bachelor apartment, aching for his children:
I poured down the remaining brandy and turned off the light. I would have liked to kiss Donald. He was my baby. My baby boy. Would he always be that? The youngest? Would that aura follow our relationship for years? I loved the turn of his head on the pillow, his turned side so warm and moist, his body almost cachetic, tense, fighting the accumulated night demons of a five-year-old life-span.
The novel places Archie between two poles, competing explanations of and responses to his divorce. One is represented by Archie’s friend and informal therapist, the Jewish psychiatrist Fogelman. Lester, who was himself Jewish, left Fogelman out of the film adaptation.
Fogelman gives voice to the new American dispensation, therapeutic and materialistic, in which personal happiness is all that matters and both marriage and divorce are best seen as tactical arrangements. “I had pleaded with Fogelman to remove the guilt of divorce,” Archie explains, and in fact Fogelman tells him he has nothing to regret. He and his ex-wife simply acted on their needs and desires like everyone else, and now both can get on with the business of making themselves happy separately. The old societal institutions and expectations are to be faced dispassionately or ironically, and discarded when necessary. As Fogelman says, when exasperated with Archie’s guilty rectitude, “I was brought up in Brooklyn, New York, and I was taught to marry a Jewish girl, and to eat Kosher meat and not to take streetcars on the Sabbath. So what?”
Petulia is Fogelman’s foil; though at other times she acts as his accomplice. She rejects Fogelman’s rationalism in favor of a kind of gnosticism of love. The failure of Archie’s marriage, in her interpretation, was not that it did not offer sufficient happiness but that he was not seeking happiness madly and desperately enough. Her aim is first to break him down, convince him that the marriage he mourns and thinks he remembers was always a collection of convenient illusions, mere social set pieces. He bridles:
“You need memories, Petulia. You need nostalgia. There have to be references in the past. Otherwise,” I shook my head slowly, “otherwise you go from nowhere to nowhere.”
“That’s how it is, Archie.”
Where Petulia differs from Fogelman is her conviction that genuine love exists, and that it can transcend good and evil. Haase pokes a few holes in that philosophy by the book’s end, but most of the time it is Fogelman’s Freud versus Petulia’s Nietzsche.
The exchange above can be read as a commentary on the rebellions of the Sixties, and on one level it is. But half a century later that is no longer the most interesting aspect of the book or the movie. More enduring are Archie’s basic questions about his obligations, his marriage and his children, about the quest for love and fulfillment their proper place in a person’s life.
This applies to Lester’s film too, though he seems more concerned to offer a critique of American imperialism and consumerism, adding some Marx to the Freud and Nietzsche. (Such concerns aren’t entirely absent from Haase’s book either.) Lester’s film adds a poor Mexican child that Petulia, on a whim, takes across the border to the United States after a vacation as a kind of adopted stray. It’s disturbing behavior, and not very plausible.
Lester’s film, like Haase’s novel, resonates most powerfully in the scenes of Archie and his ex-wife (played brilliantly by Shirley Knight), of Archie and his children, or of Archie by himself in his stunned post-marital limbo.
In Haase’s book, which is set in Los Angeles rather than San Francisco, Archie tries to maintain his fatherly connection during occasional outings with his children, such as a tour boat excusion from the Santa Monica pier:
We boarded a converted landing craft. “One adult and two children,” I had said to the ticketseller. I helped the boys board ship and not until we were well underway cruising the shores of Malibu, the Palisades, not until the waters turned slightly choppy in the morning breeze, did the boys draw closer to me.
The film relocates the scene to the San Francisco waterfront and a tour of Alcatraz, the latter rendered by Roeg with stunning formal aggression.
The most curious part about this scene, though, is that Lester places a quartet of Orthodox Jews on the boat, gesticulating in their yarmulkes in the background. Lester may have left Fogelman out of the movie, but his unanswered “So what?” haunts the movie all the same.