Themes: Midlife Crises, Culture Clash, Fish Out of Water
Main Cast: Peter Sellers, Jo Van Fleet, Leigh Taylor-Young, Joyce Van Patten, David Arkin
Release Year: 1968
Country: US
Run Time: 94 minutes
MPAA Rating: R
Plot
One of the few 1960s satires of the hippie culture that doesn't appear to be concocted by grumpy old men, I Love You, Alice B. Toklas stars Peter Sellers as Harold Fine, a staid, fortysomething Jewish attorney. Engaged to the equally straitlaced Joyce (Joyce Van Patten), Harold wistfully dreams of having a more exciting lifestyle. Through a fluke, Harold is obliged to drive a station wagon emblazoned with "psychedelic" imagery; it is with this vehicle that he picks up his flower-child brother Herbie (David Arkin), and Herbie's groovy chick Nancy (Leigh Taylor-Young). Rather enjoying the company of people outside of his establishment orbit, Harold visits Nancy at her pad, where she plies him with "hash brownies" -- concoctions laced with marijuana. His inhibitions released by the spiked pastries, Harold kicks over the traces, grows his hair to shoulder length, and embarks upon an affair with Nancy. But when the effects of the brownies wear off, Harold suddenly feels like the rather foolish middle-aged man that he is. The beauty of I Love You, Alice B. Toklas is that it patronizes neither the hippies nor the Establishment characters; both groups are shown as human beings rather than agit-prop stereotypes. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
Review
Time has not been kind to this film, which has dated about as well as the outfits worn by the hippies in the movie, yet it remains funny and entertaining throughout, largely thanks to Peter Sellers' spot-on comic performance as Harold, a mild-mannered Jewish lawyer turned counter-culture "freak." Few British actors could play Americans as convincingly as Sellers, and his mid-life angst and forced embrace of the counterculture still hit their target today. Jo Van Fleet and Joyce Van Patten are able comic foils to Sellers, as is Leigh Taylor-Young as the sexually liberated Nancy. While Larry Tucker and Paul Mazursky explore the counterculture in their screenplay with only a bit more depth than they did while writing the TV series The Monkees, they at least sympathize with their subjects; while most films of the era depicted hippies as either dangerous or a bad joke, I Love You, Alice B. Toklas! argues that, while they might seem goofy, their motives are ultimately healthy. This light-hearted spirit makes the film a lot easier to sit through than most of the anti-longhair diatribes that hit screens around the same time. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
Herb Edelman - Murray; Louis Gottlieb - Guru; Grady Sutton - Funeral Director, Mr. Walsh; Janet Clark - Mrs. Foley; Jorge Moreno - Mr. Rodriguez; Ed Peck - Man In Dress Shop; William Bramley - 1st Patrolman; Sidney Clute - Mechanic; Joe Dominguez - Grandfather Rodriguez; Eddra Gale - Love Lady; Roy E. Glenn, Sr. - Gas Station Attendant; Salem Ludwig - Father; Jack Margolis - Big Bear; Carol O'Leary - Anita; Vince Howard - 2nd Patrolman; Robert Miller Driscoll - Crying Hippie; Gary Brown - El Greco
Harold Fine is set to marry his longtime girlfriend Joyce, but is having deep second thoughts. He encounters his brother, a hippie living in Venice Beach, and falls for an attractive flower power hippie girl (played by Leigh Taylor-Young) who has a knack for making pot brownies (hence the title of the film). Harold ends up running out of his wedding to live with the hippie girl and attempts to find himself as well with the aid of a guru (or does he?).
