Lollivan It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

Tayloriona Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

Billie Morin This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

Aneesa Wardle The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Bill Slocum Watching "Petulia" is fascinating not because it is a good film but because it represents such a convoluted period in our living history. The 1960s were beautiful and weird and depressing in equal measure; so is "Petulia."Dr. Archie Bollen (George C. Scott) is trying to make a graceful exit from a social benefit when he is accosted by the title character, played by Julie Christie. She tells Archie she's married and proposes they leave together then and there to have an affair. What follows includes a series of false starts, heartbreaks, and a dangerous beating, with Archie struggling between his feelings for Petulia and his sense she's not all there."All this 'I Love Lucy' jazz, it's only cute for a while," he tells her."I'm fighting for your life," she replies.Director Richard Lester made his mark directing the Beatles; their paths had diverged by 1968 but they seemed to be on the same wavelength. "Petulia" is a psychedelic send-up of middle-class values, playing in its nonsensical, random way the same head trips John Lennon employed in one of his hit songs from the same year, "I Am The Walrus." At the heart of the film is a line by one of Archie's friends: "Nobody has a life anymore."The message comes through; what "Petulia" needs is a bit more plot and characters you can care about. Neither Scott nor Christie were warm, engaging actors, and too often here they seem content at posing. Richard Chamberlain plays Petulia's husband, David, a dangerously unstable man who lives off his rich father and tries to affect a smoothness that doesn't carry into his dealings with Petulia. With David, you want to learn why he is the way he is and whether he has the will to overcome his dark side. But David is the only character with an inner life worth exploring.What I enjoy about "Petulia" are the visuals, shot by Nicolas Roeg who captures the panorama of San Francisco in its late 1960s glory. The colors are gorgeous, and you get these odd images lasting a few frames of such things as a dog eating bull guts, nuns speeding around a garage in a sports car, and a topless woman having lunch.This sort of eclectic vision seems suited for a movie that begins at the middle and then tells you the beginning and the end of the story simultaneously. There are also multiple flashbacks, flash-forwards, and even shots of things that happen only in the characters' heads.Sound like fun? It kind of is for a while, in that arresting 1960s way that recalls better films with similar frameworks like "Blow Up" and "if….", but the kookiness and the second-unit shots wind up swallowing too much of the thin narrative, to the point where Archie and Petulia's problems don't amount to a hill of beans even in their own mixed-up world."We didn't even give each other a cold," is how one of them leaves it with the other. It's a line that works just as well for the film as a whole.

mark.waltz Sometimes seeing an older movie with certain themes is a confusing memory for a 20-something, and when you see it many years later, you get it.Unfortunately, that is not the case with "Petulia", a confusing mess of a movie that is as bad now as it was for me 25 years ago, but for much different reasons. I give films multiple chances', but even with two of my favorite actors (George C. Scott and Julie Christie) in the leads, a vast array of supporting players (Shirley Knight and Joseph Cotten among them), this one is a howling dog braying to the moonlight long before the disaster strikes.The structure of the boring plot line (if you can call it that) is so twisted that body builder Jack LaRue would have a difficult time trying to straighten it out. The beautiful Christie plays a totally whacked-out neurotic so unlikable and annoying that it is impossible to sustain interest in her beautiful block of an ice statue. Married to the older Joseph Cotten, who looks quite good in this movie, she is involved in various affairs, most seriously Scott (whom she seems to be stalking) and the younger Richard Chamberlain. Throw in a Mexican waif whom Christie and Chamberlain smuggle across the border, bits and pieces of Scott and his bizarre family, and you have a Ross Hunter soap opera, a genre that died years before. Add on to that some extremely mod fashions, strange flipping of time, some bizarre dialog, and even stranger unbelievable situations, and you know you're not in Kansas anymore.This is a combination of the worst late 60's movies I've ever seen, among them "The Legend of Lylah Clare", "Skidoo", and anything with Elizabeth Taylor post "Taming of the Shrew". Then, throw in the wild world of the not yet made "A Clockwork Orange", and you have a movie with so many moods that Ritalin couldn't calm it down.If you try to look deeply into this as art, you may find something profound. I didn't, only the knowledge that in the 1960's some filmmakers wanted to find new ways to tell stories and making movies in general. Some of them worked, most of them didn't. If you look at the list of major Oscar nominees of the years 1967-1972, I doubt you will find one of these "freak fests" ("A Clockwork Orange" excepted) up for consideration.

Edgar Soberon Torchia 1968 was a remarkable year in the history of cinema. Films as Pasolini's "Teorema", Anderson's "if...." and Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey", among others, reflected the times of sudden and often violent changes people were experiencing all over the world. "Petulia" is among those motion pictures, but it is obvious Warner Brothers executives did not realize what had director Richard Lester delivered, and handled the product badly, as the original trailer eloquently shows. I finally had the opportunity to see it after many years, since I saw it included in a list of best films, in James Monaco's book "American Film Now". "Petulia" (based on the novel by John Haase, "Me and the Arch Kook Petulia") touches neuralgic issues of difficult times in the United States in an oblique manner, not to avoid them, but because its center is the title character played by Julie Christie (excellent as usual): hippie culture, racial conflicts, Vietnam, drugs, illegal immigration, the intrusion of technology in the bedroom, and middle-class betrayal before the reign of so-called "savage capitalism", all appear as variables in the drama of a young woman abused by her husband. The script of "Petulia" is a guide to moderation and restraint: the film does not emphasize nor is it redundant, but paints all those aspects as integral parts of the portrait of a British woman trapped in (and adapted to) the life of her rich and influential in-laws, and whose intent of rupture is as fragile, fragmented and banal as her personal structure. This is told in a most innovative way for its time, which makes it more regrettable that the film was handled as a pop extravaganza, when it was an innovative and puzzling product with a structure that demanded a more intellectual participation from the audience; and with an organic use of the flash-forward technique (proposed by its editor, Antony Gibbs), an anticipation device that would become common practice in later years (it is interesting to note that five years later the cinematographer of "Petulia", Nicolas Roeg, would direct Julie Christie in the horror drama "Don't Look Now", which contains a scene film editors often mention as an outstanding example of the flash-forward technique, a sex scene inter-cut with takes of the following scene, edited by Graeme Clifford). For many who only think of Richard Lester as the maker of The Beatles movie, "Petulia" is one of several titles of his making that ask for a reconsideration of his work, which also includes very enjoyable period comedies as "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum", "Robin and Marian", "The Three Musketeers" and "The Four Musketeers".

jonnyss spoiler alert this movie is psychologically right on. petulia is in a bad marriage with bad in-laws, and archie is her way out. archie almost rescues her, but not quite. her indirectness and whimsy mask a good heart. "why didn't you come get me when you had the chance?" is the tragedy of the movie. she does rescue him: under her influence, he grows from angry, bitter, and alienated to lively and engaged - most vividly with his kids. but not present enough soon enough to take the stand of rescuing her and she stays in her compromise marriage.i'm not troubled by the flashbacks at all. they are straightforward, easy to follow, and mostly appear as memories would. much easier to follow than a soderberg movie like "the limey" - which i also liked - in which time is presented at the director's taste. in this movie we (mostly) see subjective time; the characters view the present and are triggered into the past.