Blume in Heat

George Segal died earlier this year, and TCM honored him with a day in Summer Under the Stars. One of his movies that I hadn't seen before is Blume in Love, so I recorded that. Recently I got around to watching it so that I could do a post on it here.

Segal plays Stephen Blume, a divorce lawyer in the Los Angeles area who thinks Venice is one of the most romantic cities out there, as he keeps going back, at least in his imagination. (I'm not certain whether the sequences in Venice are real; if they are, the movie has serious continuity problems.) Blume has a wife in Nina (Susan Anspach) -- or had, since he's been caught philandering and she's obtained a divorce.

Nina is a social worker, and as part of that work she meets Elmo Cole (Kris Kristofferson). He's a musician who has been unable to get a job for years, moving from state to state and living out of his truck, although somehow he has the money to get pot, among other things. In any case, Nina finds Elmo so darn charming that she invites him to live with her!

Blume is distressed by all of this, and one of the ways he handles it is by gettin a new girlfriend in Arlene (Marsha Mason). The other way is by trying to get Nina back into his life, in part by ingratiating himself to Elmo. After all, Elmo is such a nice guy that Blume can't help but like him too.

The movie goes on like this for almost two hours, without much of a plot as the characters go about their musings, sit through analysis, and the like. Then, without a half hour left, there's a plot twist that I frankly found horrifying but in the time the movie was made is apparently supposed to be something acceptable.

It didn't help for me that the box guide had this one listed as a comedy. There's certainly a place for comedies about a divorced spouse trying to win back the other half of the marriage, going back to at least The Awful Truth. But while Blume in Love is mostly fairly light drama as far as drama goes, it's definitely not comedy first, if it's even comedy at all. I didn't laugh much.

Perhaps Blume in Love is one of those "you had to be there" movies, with people who lived through the 70s and this sort of lifestyle appreciating the look at it. All I know is that I sure as hell didn't appreciate any of it.