Richard Lester’s criminally obscure 1968 film, Petulia, starred Julie Christie (at the height of her international fame and considerable beauty) as a neurotic San Francisco socialite who abruptly comes into the life of a recently divorced surgeon (George C. Scott) and basically ruins it. After watching Dr. Archie Bollen (Scott) gently care for an injured boy, Petulia Danner—who is married to a violently abusive man (Richard Chamberlain)—becomes smitten and is determined to have an affair with him. (When they first meet she says, “I’ve been married six months and I’ve never had an affair.”). When her husband finds out about the affair, he savagely beats her. In a shocking turn of events, she spurns Archie, who wants to protect her, and returns to her husband.

Petulia is a complex, daring film about disappointments in relationships, gorgeously shot against the backdrop of hippie-era San Francisco by Nicolas Roeg, with a score by composer John Barry. Richard Lester uses one of cinema’s first examples of flash-forwards and jump-cuts. (The film’s complicated non-linear structure becomes much clearer during a second viewing which is highly recommended). Critics at the time were fairly sour on Petulia (Pauline Kael famously called it Lester’s “hate letter to America”) but some 40 years later, this mostly unseen movie seems far, far ahead of its time, truly a stylistic breakthrough that added much to cinema’s evolving vocabulary. Ironically, at the same time Petulia is very much the ultimate Hollywood time capsule of “The Summer of Love.”
 

 
I’ve seen Petulia at least ten times and I think it’s an absolute masterpiece, one of the greatest American films of the 1960s, right up there with The Graduate, Bonnie and Clyde and Easy RIder. There are many, many incredibly powerful and emotional scenes in Petulia but one in particular sends chills down my spine: Scott’s Archie and his ex-wife (Shirley Knight) still feel intense pain over their divorce, and still care for each other, but they simply cannot stand to be in the same room together. They parry back and forth, each jabbing at the other, at first passive-aggressively and then ramping up the emotional violence until Scott finally just explodes. Every time I’ve ever watched this scene with someone else, the reaction is always the same when it’s over: “Wow.”

George C. Scott is just fantastic in Petulia, giving one of the best performances of his career. The same can be said of Julie Christie in the title role. I’d even give her work here the edge over her Oscar-winning 1965 role in Darling. The ending, when Petulia, who is about to give birth to Chamberlain’s baby, thinks Archie is there with her in the delivery room, reaching up to touch what she thinks is his hand as she goes under, is one of the saddest things I’ve ever seen. I really can’t recommend this film highly enough. If you love film and you’ve never seen Petulia, you owe it to yourself to see it.
 

 
Petulia was set to premiere at the 1968 Cannes Film Festival, but the May riots in Paris saw the festival cancelled that year. Petulia used to be really difficult to see and wasn’t released on DVD until 2004. It’s out of print again, but used copies are easy to come by. The film features musical cameos by Janis Joplin with Big Brother & the Holding Company (doing “Down On Me”) and the Grateful Dead (The Dead actually has more than one appearance in the film, as the band and their entourage play the on-looking hippies as Petulia is taken out on a stretcher after she’s been beaten).
 

 
Below a very young Grateful Dead (Jerry Garcia doesn’t even have a beard yet) play “Viola Lee Blues” in Richard Lester’s Petulia.
 

I think that trailer would have successfully put off most average ‘68 moviegoers!

Thanks for the tip - looking forward to seeing this - thought I knew my Lester, but obviously I’ve been malingering…

Haven’t seen it, either, watched her in “Don’t Look Now” recently on Netflix.

I was hoping this was going to be about that “Summer” X rated film that the The Band did the soundtrack for.

Just to be slightly pedantic: Jerry actually shaved off his beard when the Warlocks started; previously he’d had a standard issue folkie Van Dyke.

Nice clip from the movie!

@ me: any further info on that Summer film with soundtrack by The Band?

@stephen

The film is called Last Summer and supposedly some members of The Band did the soundtrack. Wiki says one thing and other sources say its secret tracks by The Band.

These two links are all i know about it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sb9HPs5mbJ8

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Summer

Just watched this last week. Scott is amazing in it. it also has Howard Hessman in one of his hippy roles. I wish that automated motel were still around