PETULIA

Richard Lester may have had the most chequered career in all of movies. There are some deep troughs, ("The Bed Sitting Room", "The Ritz", "The Return of the Musketeers"), but the peaks were remarkable, ("The Knack", "The Three Musketeers", "The Four Musketeers", "Robin and Marian"), but perhaps "Petulia" was the greatest peak of all. Lester liked to take risks but perhaps never more so than here, taking an already rich and emotionally complex tale and chopping it up every which way so an audience really has to work to take it all in. Superficially it's about the on-again, off-again love affair between a divorced doctor, (George C. Scott), and a somewhat off-the-wall married woman, (Julie Christie). His ex-wife is a luminously beautiful Shirley Knight while she is married to Richard Chamberlin, (superb), who likes to beat her up. It's not told chronologically. There are flashbacks or are they flash-forwards? Others in the superb cast include Arthur Hill and Kathleen Widdoes as another married couple and Joseph Cotten as Chamberlin's father. Adding to the film's texture and to its success is Nicolas Roeg's stunning cinematography and the uses he makes of the San Francisco locations. When I first saw it I chose it as the year's best film from any source, (over Kubrick's 2001). I thought that with the passage of time, (I haven't seen it since), I might find it dated and perhaps a tad pretentious. Not a bit of it; this is a film for the ages and it looks and feels as 'modern' today as it did in 1968. A masterpiece.