Petulia (DVD-Video + CD soundtrack double feature with Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland)

 

Picture: B     Sound: C     Extras: C+     Film: B-   +   CD Sound: B     Music: B

 

 

Finally, we get to review a Warner Bros. movie with its soundtrack, in this case from FilmScoreMonthly.com’s FSM label.  The film in question is Richard Lester’s ambitious 1968 film Petulia, his most experimental post-Beatles work.  Though some of the shots in the film, as well as its non-linear editing might remind one of the likes of Kubrick. Lucas, Jon Boorman or now Tarantino, it was the director of A Hard Day’s Night and Help! with Nicolas Roeg, who would use this film as much as any he did with Julie Christie to pursue one of his obsessions, a look at the female psyche like no one since Ingmar Bergman had.

 

As the trailer bold states, the film starts in the middle, works toward the end, than reveals more by saving the beginning for last.  The story involves Christie as the title character, married to an abusive husband (Richard Chamberlain) and also stuck with his rich, manipulative, elitist father (Joseph Cotton in another thankless role) making her all the more want to have an affair with a divorce doctor (George C. Scott in one of his biggest post-Dr. Strangelove risks) as an escape to some extent.

 

The acting is great, with a cast that also includes Arthur Hill and Shirley Knight; while the Lawrence B. Marcus screenplay adaptation of the John Hasse book is clever, but the ultimate problem is that it can only take obvious, common and even clichéd storytelling moments and put them out of order.  They never synthesize into the kinds of amazing films with far more ideas like Roeg would make later with Performance, The Man Who Fell To Earth, Eureka, Don’t Look Now and Walkabout.  However, it can be as a transitional film in the too brief last golden period of American Cinema that happened to have more of a British hand than usual.  That is the last of several reasons to give Petulia a look, even if it has not aged as well as other works by Lester or Roeg.  At least it is not as pretentious as Roeg’s Bad Timing (A Sensual Obsession).

 

The anamorphically enhanced 1.85 X 1 image was shot the aforementioned Nicolas Roeg, B.S.C., who went on to become an even more creative and innovate director in his own right, this would be a second reunion with Christie who he had already lensed as two characters in Francois Truffaut’s remarkable adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1966) and John Schlesinger’s Far from The Madding Crowd (1967) as a sort of trilogy of key Christie films that capture her iconography of the time and show so many sides of her.  Some shots show their age, while others are stunning in their clarity, definition and color.  The film was originally released in dye-transfer three-strip Technicolor and some of those better moments show us how great that must have been.

 

The Dolby Digital 1.0 Mono disappoints, with dialogue sometimes inaudible, while Barry’s score is limited.  The FSM CD version of his exceptional score is an amazing rerecording for an LP soundtrack release that coincided with the film’s release.  On its own, it is incredible and even when the film trips up (no puns intended), Barry’s work is stunning, nuanced and part of an amazingly prolific period of his massively impressive career.

 

Extras on the DVD include a new making-of featurette, an original featurette about how different the film was and was being sold as such and a long original theatrical trailer that furthers that point.  A Roeg or Lester expert should have done an audio commentary, but that is a nice set of extras.  The CD had enough room to offer Barry’s score for the Musical Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland (1972) that he and lyricist Don Black (Diamonds Are Forever, Thunderball) ambitiously created at a time when many ambitious attempts to make another children’s classic that respected the young audiences kept getting greenlighted.

 

Though the film has been out of circulation for years in the U.S. and Warner is likely to issue it on DVD inevitably, the songs stand out pretty well on their own and in stereo here are particularly enjoyable.  Of course, if you know the book already, you do not even need to see the film to appreciate the amazing job Barry and Black managed with such familiar material even as it was partly hijacked by the Psychedelic Era.  The combination of the two impressive Barry works makes it one of the best FSM double feature single CD soundtracks they have issued to date.  It is also a highly recommended companion to Petulia on DVD.  Go to www.filmscoremonthly.com for more information on this and other great CD soundtracks, many of which are exclusives limited to a mere 3,000 copies.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo