Petulia Danner is a young socialite married to a savagely abusive architect. At a benefit concert for victims of traffic accidents, she meets Dr. Archie Bollen, with whom she becomes smitten because he treated an injured Mexican boy. Archie is in the process of divorcing his wife Polo, sifting through relationships with the new man in his ex's life, his estranged sons, and well-to-do friends who only know Archie as one-half of a couple. Petulia and Archie embark on a quirky, desperate, and ultimately tragic affair.
Producer Raymond Wagner originally developed the film with director Robert Altman, who brought on screenwriter Barbara Turner to adapt John Haase's novel. Turner's version was largely faithful to the novel[3] – a romantic story told, as Kirkus Reviews put it, with "a light, trenchant wit."[4] A March 7, 1966 article in Daily Variety reported that James Gardner and Julie Christie were being considered for the lead roles, while later articles also mentioned that Paul Newman and Sean Connery were sought; out of these initial picks, only Christie actually appeared in the film.[5]
However, Altman and Wagner then dissolved their partnership, and Wagner engaged Richard Lester as the new director of Petulia. As Lester's biographer Andrew Yule wrote, "Lester hated both the book and the script, especially the cuteness of its leading character. But there was something about it, perhaps the challenge of bringing its archness down to earth and injecting a healthy dose of reality."[6] Lester brought on his frequent collaborator, screenwriter Charles Wood, for a page-one rewrite, then replaced Wood with Lawrence B. Marcus. As Lester told the San Francisco Examiner, "I don't see it as a comedy. Larry Marcus' screenplay has altered the novel considerably -- to a sad love story about two people who meet and turn each other into opposites."[7] Both Haase and Turner reportedly hated the revised script, and the two briefly attempted to rescind the studio's option on the novel. At one point during filming, Haase had planned to visit the set but was barred by Lester, which led to the former penning a scathing account of the project's development, including the disputes over the script, for the Los Angeles Times.[5]
The city's setting was changed from Los Angeles to San Francisco, with Lester stating that the latter lent a more "subtle" backdrop to the story. Petulia began filming on location on April 10, 1967 and lasted 11 weeks, with one more week of shooting in Tijuana, Mexico.[5] The production was said to be the first major studio attempt to shoot a film entirely in San Francisco, with locations that included the Filbert Steps, the Embarcadero, the Presidio, Fort Scott, Tiburon, Sausalito, and Muir Woods.[5] The movie included scenes at the apartment building located at 307 Filbert Street, the Cala Foods on Hyde, and the Fairmont Hotel ballroom.[8] The rock band Jefferson Airplane was slated to appear, although it was ultimately replaced by the Grateful Dead and Big Brother and the Holding Company (featuring Janis Joplin), with scenes featuring both bands filmed from May 29-31. In addition to stars George C. Scott, Julie Christie, Richard Chamberlain, Shirley Knight, and Joseph Cotten, Lester included members of the comedy troupes The Committee and Ace Trucking Company.[6]
This was Nicolas Roeg's last job as cinematographer before becoming a director. Critic Jonathan Rosenbaum points out that it was on Petulia "that Roeg can be said to have arrived at many of the rudiments of style and structure that characterize his own, subsequent films, the first of which was Performance. An essential part of this manner is a form of rapid and fragmented, kaleidoscopic cross-cutting between diverse strands in a narrative tapestry, an approach that creates meaning largely through unexpected juxtapositions. By and large, it is a wide-ranging, impressionistic method which can make a relatively simple plot multilayered and complex, and an already difficult plot a series of puzzles and mazes."[9]
Reception
Petulia had been listed to compete at the 1968 Cannes Film Festival,[10] but the festival was cancelled due to the May 1968 protests and unrest in France.[6] The initial theatrical release was in NYC on June 10, 1968 with a wider release after its Los Angeles premiere on August 20.[5]
John Haase, the author of the source novel, loathed the movie, and wrote a scathing article for the Los Angeles Times about the book's journey to the screen, concluding, "The novel is gone. Barbara Turner's screenplay is gone. Altman is gone, Petulia is gone, Archie is gone. Only Ray Wagner is left, and Dick Lester and 350,000 feet of film, and miniskirts, and the Jefferson Airplane, and the Grateful Dead, and the topless restaurants, and the hippies, and the junkies and the go-go girls and the mod and the pop and the op and all the other sick and ugly things of our time the book never dealt with at all. That's what's left."[3]
Lester was pleased with the film. As he told Steven Soderbergh years later: "I felt that I had plugged into what I wanted to say, and that a chance had been given me by odd circumstances: taking a book that seemed totally wrong and being angry about it, then trying to see what one could make of it and using that as a means of talking about fairly complicated things...a frazzled and disjointed response to a society that was in chaos and they didn't know how to deal with it."[11]
The film was a box-office disappointment, earning just $1.6 million on a $3.5 million budget.[5]Tobias Churton wrote in his book The Spiritual Meaning of the Sixties: "Petulia failed to strike a chord with the public. Its approach was too advanced, ambiguous, perhaps even too prophetic."[12]
The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote: "Richard Lester's choice of San Francisco – possibly both the most picturesque and gimmick-ridden of American cities – as the setting for his "sad love story" is not simply a baroque piece of window dressing. His film is principally about people's inability to make contact with one another – whether attempting to do so from love, loneliness, hatred or compassion – and the touristic attractions of the swinging city, far from being merely decorative, are indications of the reasons for this failure... The principal virtue of Petulia (Lester's first attempt at a serious, psychological drama) lies in the extent to which it 'convincingly portrays the impossibility of romantic ties in a glittering, swinging world....Petulia's dizzying jigsaw puzzle structure combines with Nicolas Roeg's attractive photography to create its: own bright universe, leaving one with the suspicion that the destruction of love and romance is due less to contemporary social pressures than to the fashion for fragmentary narrative techniques."[13]
Giving the film four stars, Roger Ebert wrote in his Chicago Sun-Times review of 1 July 1968: "Richard Lester's Petulia made me desperately unhappy, and yet I am unable to find a single thing wrong with it."[14] In The New York Times, Renata Adler called it "a strange, lovely, nervous little film."[6] On the other side of the ledger, in her 1969 essay "Trash, Art, and the Movies," Pauline Kael wrote that "I have rarely seen a more disagreeable, a more dislikable (or a bloodier) movie than Petulia."[15] Critic John Simon called the film "a soulless, arbitrary, attitudinizing piece of claptrap."[6]
In time, however, Petulia developed a cult following, and many critics and writers came to see it as a key film of its era. Danny Peary devoted a chapter to the film in his 1981 book Cult Movies, describing it as "one of the best American films of the last fifteen years. Petulia is a brilliant film, inspiringly cast and beautifully acted, so rich in character and visual and aural detail that it takes several viewings to absorb it all. Lester makes the viewer work to grasp the meaning of his film."[16] In How to Read a Film, James Monaco called Petulia "as prescient as it was sharply ironic – one of the two or three best American films of the period."[17]Joel Siegel asserted that "Petulia is, without question, my favorite American movie, perhaps my favorite of all movies. I’ve seen it at least twice a year since it was released and each viewing has yielded fresh insights and pleasures."[6]
The film was released on VHS. A US DVD was released in 2006.[20]
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References
↑ "Big Rental Films of 1968", Variety, 8 January 1969 p 15. This figure is a rental accruing to distributors.
↑ "Petulia". British Film Institute Collections Search. Retrieved 11 May 2024.
1 2 Haase, John (23 July 1967). "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to 'Petulia'". The Los Angeles Times.
↑ Soderbergh, Steven (1999). Getting Away With It, or: The Further Adventures of the Luckiest Bastard You Ever Saw. Faber & Faber. ISBN0-571-19025-1.
↑ Churton, Tobias (2018). The Spiritual Meaning of the Sixties: The Magic, Myth, and Music of the Decade That Changed the World. Simon & Schuster. ISBN978-1620557129.
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