Lovesick

It's rather like Arthur meets Woody Allen but manages to do neither well, which is surprising since the director wrote the script for Annie Hall. You'd think you'd at least have a decent rip-off of an Allen rom-com. But you would be wrong.

Dr. Saul Benjamin (Dudley Moore) is a well ordered and conscientious married psychiatrist in New York City. A colleague confesses that he has fallen in love with a patient (Elizabeth McGovern as Chloe) and then dies of a heart attack. As a result, Benjamin ends up taking on the object of his dead colleague's affection as a patient. Subsequently, he also falls in love with her, but wonders what she feels for him. So he does what any conscientious psychiatrist would do - He steals her keys, breaks into her apartment, reads her diary, and then hides in the bathroom - in the bathtub actually - which is where she discovers him.

Rather than finding this behavior over-the-top creepy and calling the police, she finds it endearing and they start a love affair. At least Benjamin is honest with his wife about all of this, and she doesn't mind in the least because she is having an affair too. Complications ensue.

The part that ages the worst - the stalking, the breaking and entering, and the diary reading - was actually the main part of the trailer for the film, which 41 years later is unbelievable. I know this, because I remember the ads for it in the theater so I remember the scene.

Peter Sellers was supposed to have the role of Dr. Benjamin, but died of a heart attack before filming began. I can't see it playing any better had he had the role, since the age difference between Moore and McGovern is part of what makes this thing not work, and Peter Sellers was even older than Moore.

I've watched this film at least once a year since it first came out on VHS (or was it Betamax?) It is hilarious. I can't think of a better cast for a comedy than we have here, all playing around the central Dudley Moore character. The jokes, both visual and verbal, are rich with irony and wit. ("What is this, egg salad?" is my personal favorite.) The love story is only a driver for a comedy mix of this wide array of bizarre characters: Dudley Moore, Alec Guinness, John Huston, David Stathairn, Wallace Shawn, Ron Silver and many more whose names you may not know but who's faces you'll recognize.

I was quoting a line from the film the other day and got to talking about it with a friend. That led me to do a search on IMDb. The 4.3 rating makes no sense to me at all. It has my "personal 10", as it is a movie I can watch again any time. After all these years it is just as funny as it was 30 years ago.

If you want the kind of mood that this movie fails to achieve, go and watch Play It Again, Sam (1972), a movie brilliantly written but luckily, not directed by Woody Allen and more straight than Annie Hall. Annie Hall's success may be the biggest hint on why this loose borefest was made.

Dudley Moore and Elizabeth Mcgovern pairing have no chemistry and energy. Their straight performances clash with the comedic nature of the playful supporting cast. It's like characters of a different movie interacting with a funnier (but not much) one. Both performances are subpar especially Dudley's doozed minimal reactions to everything.

On a more technical note, the movie looks bad. VHS-level bad. Dull colors, insufficient lighting and blooming light sources everywhere, especially on the restaurant scene a distracting sunlight glare that even bleeds through Mcgovern head.

The soundtrack is the most carefully handled aspect of this movie, but still felt misplaced at some points.

Lovesick 1983. Dudley Moore, Eliz. McGovern. Movie makes mincemeat of Freud & his limited & negative theory of human motivation & potential. "Go Saul", I hear myself thinking throughout the film, feeling here is a therapist who dares stand up to the stiff board of censors who don't deserve to have access to mentally unstable people, for they appear more rigid & dogmatic than the deacons at a Southern Baptist convention. And they have the nerve to be talking about & threatening sanctions pertaining to professional ethics. Would you want to be governed by such repressed stiffs who purport to be a board of censors who can pull someone's license to practice a profession, yet see their distant grandfather Freud as still relevant, while most progressive thinkers in psychotherapy have all but laughed Freud off the shelf as ludicrous? The genius of the writer who says it through Cloe's words put Freud's ideas into perspective when she laughs him & Saul off the stage with her witty explanation of Freud's penis envy theory.

A gem of a movie that should be part of every psychotherapist training program & anyone dealing with profession ethics. Indeed, the whole idea of licensure boards being composed solely of those within a given profession just reveals the fear of innovation & insecurity of those within those professions. It is abhorrent to the whole concept of the evolution of human thinking & knowledge to censure someone who challenges the wisdom of old, unproven, & in many cases disproven, methods of therapy, education, medicine, "justice", & many other so-called professions. Just look at the travesty of the medical profession that, hand-in-hand with the drug pushing pharmaceutical industry, prescribes aspirin for headaches rather than treating the ailment (tumor?) hiding within, or the repressive incarceration of youth, which some still dare call education, that is flooding the earth with non-thinking violent robots seeking revenge & targets for the decade plus of physical, & even more disturbingly, emotional abuse perpetrated by their unfeeling bullying teachers & peers.

See the movie & think about the rights of innovative creative thinkers & why so few are free to think for themselves.

This is a very fine romantic comedy, and if it reminds us of a Woody Allen film, then guess why! It is written and directed by Allen's friend and colleague Marshall Brickman, who wrote Allen's famous films ANNIE HALL (1977), for which he won an Oscar, and MANHATTAN (1979, see my review), for which he was nominated for an Oscar, as well as his earlier film SLEEPER (1973), and twenty years later, Allen's MANHATTAN MURDER MYSTERY (1993). Brickman's association with Woody Allen goes back so far that he wrote Allen's comedy material in 1967 for a television special. I believe Brickman used to be represented by Jack Rollins, back in the days when Jack was agent and manager for Allen, Dick Cavett, Joan Rivers, and the whole crowd of young Manhattan comedians as they were in the 1960s when I knew them all, as well as the amazing Jack Rollins himself, who is certainly one of the cinema's unsung heroes. Woody Allen owes his whole cinema career to Jack Rollins in my opinion, and without Jack, Dick Cavett would possibly never have risen above stand-up work in nightclubs such as the Bon Soir on 8th Street, as he was when I knew him. Jack Rollins thus created the entire genre of which this Marshall Brickman film (possibly written for Allen originally, with Allen being replaced instead with Dudley Moore) is an excellent example. Brickman (now 74) is still at work, and has written the book for the musical film JERSEY BOYS set for release next year. And last year he appeared in WOODY ALLEN: A DOCUMENTARY (2012). This film has Sigmund Freud step into the action as a projection of the hero's imagination, a device used so brilliantly in Herbert Ross's film with Allen, PLAY IT AGAIN, SAM (1972), where Bogart does the same thing. Freud is impeccably played by Alec Guinness, who does not overdo the accent and judges the part perfectly. Dudley Moore had, by the time this film was made, been a terrific hit in Hollywood because of 10 (1979) and ARTHUR (1981), and he was considered a hot box office property. Probably this film was set up on that basis. 'Dud', as he was called in England, was certainly no dud on screen, and here he shines with his usual soft charm and melting gaze. He was really very cuddly as a screen personality. The only time I ever met him was when he was still married to Suzy Kendall (they divorced in 1972), and they came together to a private screening. I didn't speak to her but exchanged a few words with him. I knew, as everyone did, that Dudley was short, but it was a shock to see in person just how short, especially beside his wife. He was only five foot two and a half. On that occasion, he was wrapped in an enormous fur coat with a huge collar which nearly engulfed his head, and he did not take it off in the screening theatre, even though it was not cold. In this film, Dudley's limp shows clearly, as he was born with his left foot as a club foot, and the corrective surgery as a child was not completely satisfactory. With those two physical handicaps, it is amazing that Dudley had such a successful career, and what is more, was assailed by countless women who wanted not only to cuddle cute little Dud, but do real grown up things with him as well, so that he developed a reputation as a serious ladies' man and had four wives. Certainly Dudley was in my opinion one of the funniest comedians ever produced by Britain, and his BBC TV sketches with his pal Peter Cook will and cannot ever be forgotten, so that people still roar with laughter at them even though they have seen them dozens of times. The girl in the film is played by the beautiful 22 year-old Elizabeth McGovern, in her first major film role. The makeup lady went a bit too far in whitening her face, especially around her eyes to heighten the startling blue of her eyes. But never mind, she is a vision of beauty and who could resist her? Certainly not Dudley's character, Dr. Saul Benjamin, a respected Freudian psychoanalyst, whose patient she becomes. Dudley goes through the various Woody Allenesque guilt and obsession syndromes, and does a terrific job of it. Everything is very hilarious, but sad at the same time, and it is also all very Manhattan. Most of Dudley's psychiatric patients, seen often on the couch or flapping their arms as they imagine they are flying around his office, are hilariously mad, or otherwise self-indulgent narcissists, which is almost as funny. The ups and the downs of this 'counter-transference' romance are shown as the inevitable waves of the sea of love, pardon the purple prose. It is all very entertaining and well done, and I hope that one day in the future when all the ouevres are complete, some wise cinema historian surveying the 'Woody Allen Movement', will not omit the films directed by Marshall Brickman, especially this one, from consideration as an inseparable part of the genre. Brickman deserves more attention and recognition than he has ever received, although as an Oscar winner, maybe he has a few laurels upon which to rest his comically imaginative head, and perhaps even thus rests content. Let us hope so.