ChanRobt

We thought we were so hip then, but the sixties are making the fifties look pretty sophisticated. And guess what--in a lot of ways, they were.

Cactus Flower evidences all the symptoms of the reaction middle aged men had to the sixties. I.A.L. Diamond, who adapted this to the screen, was Billy Wilder's longtime collaborator. The Apartment, Some Like It Hot--they worked. But this screenplay sounds like Neil Simon on a succession of very bad days.

Ingrid Bergman takes a weak part as a middle-aged spinster nurse and still manages to come off well. In fact, the only time this picture comes alive at all is when she's there.

And why the hell is Matthau's dentist chasing Goldie Hawn when he's got Ingrid in his lobby? Did we ever think Goldie was cute? She's skinny, sexless, doe-faced, and overly made up with terrible kewpie doll makeup. Other than her age, her assets are not obvious.

Ingrid seems to have on no makeup at all, and her classic features along with classic style outclasses Goldie this was to Sunday.

The scenes all drag, the jokes almost all stretch hard for a laugh. And the neuroses underlying this are all so redolent of middle-aged men of a certain era confronting the supposedly free-spirited flower children poorly exemplified by Goldie.

I thought she was funny on Laugh-In, but I'm sure I don't want to see the old tapes now.

As an embarrassing, but revealing, period piece, as sociology and archaeology, Cactus Flower may have some value to social historians. As a movie, it has nothing to recommend it but Ingrid.

About Schmidt is a highly intelligent, compassionate, and

insightful depiction of a man confronting his mortality and the

emptiness of a life that suddenly doesn't seem to have added up

to much.

It also manages to illuminate with brilliance and restraint the

loneliness and of an eviscerated American landscape and of the

sterility of lives bereft of self-understanding.

Nicholson, too, is unusually restrained. And both his performance

and the final effect of this picture are enormously moving.

Perhaps you'll have to be well into middle age to experience the

full poignancy of "About Schmidt". But it would certainly have to be

affecting for most people of intelligence and sensitivity.

And, by the way, I forgot something rather important. This movie is

also very funny.