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Thursday, August 10, 2023

I Love You, Alice B. Toklas!


I Love You, Alice B. Toklas is a 1968 American romantic comedy film directed by Hy Averback and starring Peter Sellers. The film is set in the counterculture of the 1960s. The cast includes Joyce Van Patten, David Arkin, Jo Van Fleet, Leigh Taylor-Young (in her film debut) and a cameo by the script's co-writer Paul Mazursky. The title refers to writer Alice B. Toklas, whose 1954 autobiographical cookbook had a recipe for cannabis brownies. The film's eponymous theme song was performed by sunshine pop group Harpers Bizarre.

Attorney Harold Fine is cornered into setting a date for marriage by his secretary/fiancée, Joyce. Because of a fender bender, he ends up driving a hippie vehicle, a psychedelically painted station wagon. When taking his hippie brother, Herbie, to the funeral of his family's butcher he encounters Nancy, Herbie's girlfriend, an attractive, free-spirited, barefoot flower power lady. She takes a liking to Harold, and after they spend a night together in his home, makes him pot brownies. However, she departs without telling him about its special ingredient, and not knowing what they are he eats them and feeds them to his father, mother, and fiancée, who dissolve in laughter and silliness. Harold considers the "trip" a revelation, and begins renouncing aspects of his "straight" life. He leaves his fiancée at the chuppah moments before they are to be married, starts living with Nancy, and tries to find himself with the aid of a guru. Ultimately he discovers the hippie lifestyle is as unfulfilling and unsatisfying as his old lifestyle—Nancy says that monogamy "isn't hip"—and once more decides to marry Joyce. At the last minute, he again leaves her at the altar and runs out of the wedding onto a city street saying he doesn't know for sure what he is looking for but, "there's got to be something beautiful out there."

Roger Ebert found some of the movie "good and pretty close to the mark, and Sellers is very funny," he disliked the film's stereotyped view of hippiedom, concluding, "If they'd dropped Sellers into a real hippie culture, we might really have had a movie here."

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