Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie's plot.

I'm pretty sure that the lame comedy "I Love You Alice B. Toklas" seemed silly to 1968 viewers, both "squares" and "potheads." Fed electric brownies made from a box (rather than from the most famous recipe in The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook) straight-laced but simmering Harold Fine (sic.!) (Peter Sellers) and his albatross of secretary/fiancée (Joyce Van Patten), start giggling even before finishing ingesting brownies. Watching them playing drunks, I marvel that none of the film-makers knew (1) that (ingested marijuana takes some time to kick in and (2) that people who are stoned don't act like people who are drunk. Surely, Sellers himself knew!

Peter Sellers was good as the seething and very hirsute lawyer. He thinks he is fine, despite having a nagging and materialistic fiancee to augment the nagging of his materialistic and empty-headed mother (Jo Van Fleet wasted in a stereotype Jewish mother role) and seeming to be living a life of quiet desperation.

His nuclear family also includes a jellyfish father (Salem Ludwig) and blissed-out hippie brother, Herbie (David Arkin).

Sellers is also good at the end when he has burned out or is on a bad trip and is weary of all the freeloaders who have moved into his apartment -- and started to share his flower-child free-spirited, free-love practitioner bedmate). His goofy "Love, Peace, Happiness" period is silly without being funny. As his muse, Leigh Taylor-Young is very attractive. The fake tattoo of a Monarch butterfly on her upper thigh is treated with reverence by Fine and not doubt inspired fantasies in the male audience of licking it up and proceeding under her very short mini skirts. The bubblegum music group Harper's Bazaar supply a typically saccharine title song two or three times to complete the trivialization of the Toklas/Stein couple.

There are some sight gags on psychedelically painted cars and the bizarre couture of the freeloaders (and the family of eleven Mexican clients claiming whiplash, all wearing neck braces) and the surprise that a casket stuffed into the back of the psychedelic car Fine has while his car is in the garage doesn't fall out. The movie was coscripted by Paul Mazursky, from whom I expected better, directed by Hy Averback, who mostly worked in television.


(Much better Sellers include movies include I'm Alright, Jack, Lolita, Dr. Strangelove...)


© 2007, Stephen O. Murray

Recommended: No

Viewing Format: DVD
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age