brefane Despite it's subject matter, Carnal Knowledge directed by Mike Nichols from a script by cartoonist Jules Feiffer is a dud without a single likable or really interesting character. Nicholson's grating, Bergen lame and simpering, Ann-Margret more tiresome than the role calls for and non-actor Art Garfunkal keeps his head above water more or less. In support, a worn looking Rita Moreno has a good bit as a prostitute, Carol Kane cast for her freakish appearance says nothing and Cynthia O'Neal is repellently smug. Nichols' film is a series of cartoon panels with no sense of any life surrounding the characters. Nichols appears to have been influenced by the films of Bergman and Antonioni though he lacks their brilliance. The result is a dim view of human relationships that is unpleasant and pointless.

hou-3 This movie attracts quite a lot of admiration here which puzzles me. It is a kind of summation of the awfulness of the sixties sexual revolution - its sourness, acute misogyny, deep unhappiness and disconnect. The two male protagonists, well played by Nicholson and Garfunkel, though their roles are really nothing but stereotypes, are equally unsympathetic, self obsessed, selfish, duplicitous and vain, while the women are just there as sex objects. It's a deeply depressing movie. The film has dated badly, as one would expect, and with such a bleak message it's hard to see why anybody except an admirer of the lead actors would bother with it today.

apvalenti The sixties were a time when nearly every boundary was tested. In the seventies we began to learn that boundaries don't necessarily restrict freedom but exist to provide elasticity which stretched too thin too fast can break. Carnal Knowledge follows two buddies through their college years and into middle age a period during which the sexual revolution swept many not into a new land of liberation but to a world of sexual dysfunction, misogyny, and oppression. Jack Nicholson is terrific as man who became a callous, self-centered product of the revolution. Art Garfunkel, in a stiff and uninteresting performance, is Nicholson's erudite buddy. Directed by Mike Nichols, the movie lacks the wit of "The Graduate" and Jules Feiffer's script is leaden without a hint of irony that could elevate the film from tolerable to entertaining. Carnal Knowledge is a curio of late sixties/early seventies film-making that captures, depressingly, the underside of the '60s sexual revolution. Perhaps a wittier, lighter touch would have made this a classic.

daha1120 For the first half hour the characters are so disgusting and terrible, the feeling of bile rising in my throat doesn't subside. These are the people who I have known. And while I cannot bring myself to turn it off, I also can't help but fondly remember watching all of his movies that he made before this one, the spark that say The Graduate or Catch-22 had, and this just feels a little flat. But at the same time, it seems to completely succeed in doing what it sets out to do, creating something suffocatingly real, like watching the most depressing moments in my life played back for me with dim lighting and blonder actresses. The fact that Candice Bergen goes away after that also helps. Upper middle class ennui is something that's almost always tedious to watch, but this is actually affecting. Nonetheless, this feels like the beginning of the end for Mike Nichols. He would never again make anything on a level with Catch-22, and he followed this one up with Day of the Dolphins. Seriously. wtf. Also for the curious, pop star Arthur Garfunkle (as the back of the DVD box puts it) gives a surprisingly strong performance in this.