Orale Carnal

Mike Nichols, director of The Graduate and more recently Closer clearly harbours some downbeat views on relationships, and Carnal Knowledge was probably his least ambiguously unsentimental take on the masculine contribution to sexual real-politik.

I first saw this film one night with V over a decade ago, and we both recall being far more impressed than we were with this renewed acquaintance. She used to number it amongst her all-time favourites. Maybe when you first see it you can better sense the ground being broken?

One of the most prominent novel techniques that Nichols clearly revelled in is that of leaving the camera on the face and torso of one character during a conversation involving several others outside the shot.

Such humour as there is is of the malicious sort and you need to be in the appropriately negative frame of mind for that. Back in 1971 the print was seized and film faced charges of obscenity in the U.S. Supreme Court. Odd perhaps, because there's really not that much sex or nudity, but Jack Nicholson does get to say "cunt" in amusing circumstances. (Proof again that only some people can use this word without appearing to be one themselves.)

Obscene more by implication than representation perhaps. The judges decided that Carnal Knowledge "did not depict sexual conduct in a patently offensive way", though they might have added that it does suggest that the sexual conduct of the average male tends to the nasty (and the sad). In the end Feiffer's story would have us pity these sad specimens who have spent thirty years finding out the hard way that their carnal expectations are never going to be endorsed by their experience.

The first female object that both friends bounce off is provided by Candice Bergen (who auditioned unsuccessfully for the part of Mrs Robinson in The Graduate, played by the late Anne Bancroft.) At the time Art Garfunkel and Ann-Margaret were viewed as odd casting decisions, but both acquitted themselves well enough.

Jack Nicholson has an extended rant which is clearly a precursor to some of his more famous later interpretations, and apparently left him unable to speak for a day after the scene was shot. At one point he shouts "heeeeeeeeeeeeeres Bo-bby"!