Not just beatniks

I mentioned in my review of Flower Drum Song how Hollywood didn't seem to have a handle on how to portray beatniks when they were the perceived counterculture of the late 1950s. Fast-forward to the end of the following decade, and the counterculture were now hippies. The old guard of Hollywood certainly didn't know how to deal with them, either, leading to all sorts of disasters, such as I Love You, Alice B. Toklas!.

Peter Sellers is the star here, playing Harold Fine, a Los Angeles lawyer who drives a Lincoln Continental and who lives a very upper-middle-class lifestyle, with the one major exception being that he's 35 and still hasn't gotten married. Oh, he's got a long-term girlfriend in the form of his secretary Joyce (Joyce Van Patten), and she's been pushing him to set a date for the wedding. But it takes getting in a fender-bender and having to drive a courtesy car -- a station wagon painted by the garage owner's hippie son who then decamped for San Francisco -- to get Harold to change his mine.

Harold has good news for his mom (Jo Van Fleet), but she springs a surprise on him first. She barges into his office talking about dying at 61 being much too young, so Harold immediately thinks Dad has died. No; it's just Mrs. Fine's butcher. (Apparently not a kosher butcher, which is weird since the Fines are Jewish and there's a joke about the butcher being Catholic.) And Mom wants Harold to go find his kid brother Herbie (David Arkin, no relation to Alan) to bring him to the funeral. Herbie has also "dropped out" to become a hippie somewhere in the Venice Beach area. Herbie introduces Harold to his girlfriend Nancy (Leigh Taylor-Young), and the two become friends, as Nancy doesn't seem as far out there as some of the other hippies.

One day, Nancy finds some brownie mix in Harold's apartment, and makes some edibles by putting pot into the brownies, not that they used the term edibles in the day as far as I'm aware. Harold doesn't know what's in the brownies and serves them to his parents and Joyce, who immediately begin to find everything terribly funny, although at least they don't start violently playing the piano. For Harold, however, it continues to make him think about making changes to his life.

So on the day of his wedding, while he's standing under the chuppah, Harold has a change of heart and walks out on Joyce and all the guests in attendance, and goes off to live with Nancy and the rest of the hippies. Or, to bring Nancy to him and have all of her hippie friends start crashing Harold's apartment to the point that you wonder how they can all afford to live this lifestyle and how nobody at the law firm noticed Harold's change. Especially his ex-fiancée Joyce, who after all still works as his secretary. And then after a while Harold suddenly figures out the hippie life isn't all it's cracked up to be....

I Love You, Alice B. Toklas! is one of those movies that was panned at the time, and I think with good reason. I suppose there's a good idea here of a man having a midlife crisis, but that kernel of an idea is simply a hook for all of Hollywood's stereotypes about countrcultures which quickly become grating and unfunny. A lot of Hollywood movies tried to take a humorous look at the rapidly shifting culture of the 1960s, something I've referred to as the "generation gap movie" for lack of a better term. Most of them wound up badly dated, and in that regard I Love You, Alice B. Toklas! is no different.