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Lester's one grab for auteur status, before he settled for empty spectacle (Superman II and III, The Three and Four Musketeers, etc). Sorry to say, despite the extreme beauty of some of the sets and costumes--Tony Walton was chief designer, with David Hicks assisting--and Nicholas Roeg's superb camerawork (those sun-drenched streets, the boats, everything lovely), this film is a confused mess.

If Lester had tried to make it with Arthur Penn's emotional directness instead of Alain Resnais's scrambling of time and plot elements, it might have been very good. Instead we get barrages of chopped-up scenes thrown at us; we don't know if Petulia was beaten last week, last year or next week. Very few scenes are allowed to stand on their own, one such is the George C. Scott-Shirley Knight argument at his place when he throws the bag of cookies at her. We are able to see his frustration and wild humor surface here. You can't tell what's going on inside Christie's head for most of the picture, one dumb shtick act follows another (stealing a tuba, turning up in the hospital library just to bug Scott, and on and on). Christie is a fine actress, and was just about the sexiest woman on the screen then--forget about that Jacqueline Bisset robot--but Lester doesn't let her develop her character.

What we have is a sado-masochistic couple (Chamberlain-Christie) with a sinister Faulknerian father in Joseph Cotten: listen to him talk about family values in the old south in a tone of barely-suppressed rage as Christie lies in her hospital bed, comic-horror. Into the mix strides Scott, with a lot of emotional issues of his own (wife lost, kids estranged), and our hapless surgeon must try to keep Christie out of the morgue. It just doesn't work.

Milos Forman is settling in to America here, learning the ways of rich Puritans. The casting is just about perfect; I don't recall Buck Henry being as expressive--in that deadpan way--in a movie. The scene between Georgia Engel and Lynn Carlin, in which Engel relates stories of her husband's incredible sexual drive is wonderfully funny. The strip poker scene between Henry, Carlin and their guests Audra Lindley and Paul Benedict, that ends with Henry singing an aria, naked, on top of the dining-room table has passed into cinematic legend.

Miroslav Ondricek's camera work is really exceptional; it makes a success of one scene that drags on too long--the therapy group with the participants smoking reefer. Ondricek's ability to give life to interiors is amazing: see how he cuts from the ancestral paintings to the would-be dopers, making comments on both. This man, who turns 70 this year, is a master, and if I just give a partial list of his work you will know what I mean: The Fireman's Ball, If..., O Lucky Man!, Hair, Amadeus.

Allegret's most impressive location story, far better than the damp philosophizing of Une si jolie petite plage. I liked the approach: the characters are not symbols of alienation or corruption but have lives of their own. The meningitis outbreak in this Mexican town doesn't stand in for the moral decline of the West, unlike the plague in Puenzo's La peste, one of the worst films William Hurt ever made. I imagine that if Luis Bunuel had done this adaptation of a Sartre story, it would have looked a lot like Los olvidados, and the vomiting and sweating of the victims would have taken precedence over the moral self-questioning of the characters.

Gerard Philipe is tremendous as the drunken ex-doctor with a terrible secret; he was able to forget that he'd become the official leading man of French cinema, star of the Cinema of Quality that Truffaut detested so much. Ditto for Michele Morgan, whose parts usually had aristocratic backgrounds, or at least great wealth. As the not-very-grieving widow of the first disease victim, she holds the picture together, making sure we don't get too swayed by Philipe's lowlife antics.