I Love You, Alice B Toklas! *** (1968, Peter Sellers, Jo Van Fleet, Leigh Taylor-Young, Joyce Van Patten, David Arkin, Herb Edelman) – Classic Movie Review 8547

The Jewish middle-class and Sixties hippie cultures are satirised in director Hy Averback’s unevenly amusing 1968 comedy I Love You, Alice B Toklas!, with Peter Sellers on form as a mild West Coast lawyer taking up with flower power to escape from his fiancé (Joyce Van Patten ) with a sex manual.

The 35-year-old Los Angeles lawyer Harold Fine (Sellers) is particularly taken with hippie flower child Nancy (Leigh Taylor-Young) and her marijuana brownies, cooked to the Alice B Toklas recipe of course. Jo Van Fleet has a whale of a time as Sellers’s Jewish mother, and Taylor-Young is sweet. But the film belongs to the much-missed Sellers, proving he was much, much more than just Inpsector Clouseau.

I Love You, Alice B Toklas! is a quirky, funny movie, and its period charm has now added to its pleasures. Director Averback has a cameo as the rabbi at the wedding.

It is written by Paul Mazursky and Larry Tucker.

Also in the cast are David Arkin, Herb Edelman, Salem Ludwig, Louis Gottlieb, Grady Sutton, Janet E Clark, Jorge Moreno, Ed Peck, Jack Margolis, Eddra Gale, Carol O’Leary, Gary Brown, Sidney Clute, Roy Glenn, Joe Dominguez, William Bramley, Vince Howard, Robert Miller Driscoll, Karen Mickievic, Ron Stokes and Chuck Ward.

Ed Asner read for the role of Sellers’s brother-in-law Murray, but lost out to Herb Edelman – and Asner’s disappointment was doubled when he stumbled onto the film’s set and bumped in to the two actors on his way to beg his agent for a loan of $10,000.

© Derek Winnert 2019 Classic Movie Review 8547

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