I Love You Alice B. Toklas (1968)

Goon Pod

"... Sellers is very funny. Unfortunately, the movie’s general approach to hippiedom is what we’ve come to dread. Hippies wear funny clothes, sleep on the stove, don’t wash, read the Los Angeles Free Press, bake pot brownies, put up posters everywhere and operate with a sort of mindless, directionless love ethic. So the movie becomes conventional after all. If they’d dropped Sellers into a real hippie culture, we might really have had a movie here." (Roger Ebert, 1968)

Despite the misgivings of the exalted Mr Ebert, I Love You Alice B. Toklas is a pretty good film generally. This week's guest, the writer John Williams, and Tyler both had fun watching it and talking about it, and were particularly impressed by Peter Sellers' winning turn as lawyer Harold Fine who undergoes a mid-life crisis and embraces the patchouli-scented hippy lifestyle.

With solid support from the likes of Joyce Van Patten and Leigh Taylor-Young, the film is a fine showcase for Sellers' talents and despite dated fashions more or less holds up. So turn on, tune in, drop out and enjoy Goon Pod this week!