As putrid as reputed, a singularity of excess. I loved it!

I do not know the details of Candy's production, but I suspect that the bulk of the scenes were shot with only one take. That is the only explanation I can conjure.

I only knew of this film by way of seeing the trailer at a drive-in in the 60s. The images sparked my 10-year-old imagination, particularly James Coburn flipping off the operating room gallery and the loud rock music. I had to see it! I finally found a limited edition DVD copy on eBay and snapped it up.

When I first saw this, on its release, I laughed until I thought I'd pop a gut. I didn't laugh so much this time around but then I don't laugh as much as I used to -- at anything.

But look at that cast: Burton, Huston, Brando, Aznavour, Coburn, Pallenberg, Matthau, among others. And some talent behind the camera as well.

It's easy to dismiss this as just one more disorganized non sequitur from the 1960s, chaos trying to pass for art, but it's really more serious than that. I suppose "serious", in that context, should be in quotation marks. Yes, it's a kaleidoscopic jumble but there's an uncanny continuity underneath the overt narrative. The novel, after all, was written by Terry Southern, who gave us "Doctor Strangelove" among other satirical works of the 1960s. Some of his send ups are more whimsical than others but they're hardly pointless.

Among the targets skewered here: the reverence in which high-echelon surgeons are held (and in which they hold themselves); the American propensity to protect itself and the rest of the world by military intervention; the charisma of alcoholic poets (I think Southern missed the boat on that one, at least as far as American students are concerned); the crypto-mysticism of Eastern philosophy so fashionable in the 60s; the nouvelle vague films that flooded the art houses; gay bars in Greenwich Village; the longing that some Irish cops have to bust heads over what they perceive as "infractions"; the Circum-Mediterranean virginity mystique; and the patronizing and politically correct attitude towards the disabled and deformed.

Southern's novel (I don't know who Mason Hoffenberg is, but I can't find any trace of him in the book) is funnier than the movie, and sexier too. For whatever reasons, it's difficult to transpose Southern's written work to the screen. "The Magic Christian," a story with enormous wit, flopped as a movie. But when it's Southern who's writing the adaptation, the movies generally turn out pretty well -- "The Loved One," for instance, which did a good job of capturing some of Evelyn Waugh's humor while adding some absurdities of Southern's own. That movie introduced us to the word "PRE-vert."

Here, the narrative explores and explodes some of the most primitive verities of the Western world in the 1960s, not all with equal success. And sometimes director Marquand goes over the top with the special effects. John Astin doesn't really belong in the movie. The other principal actors seem to know the meaning of debauchery but Astin works too hard at hipness, only to achieve hepness. Ringo Starr isn't an actor. Too bad all the performances weren't up to the level of the short guy who played the blue-eyed eager Irish cop (Joey Forman?).

It's not a masterpiece and some episodes are more amusing than others but, then, what is perfection? A petty illusion of the material world, unworthy of definition, as Marlon Brando's phony guru might put it, a complete ascetic when he's not secretly gobbling down salami and beer. It's colorful. It's funny. It features the calf-like eyes and robust figure of Miss Teenage Sweden. What more can you ask for -- a return to the innocence of the early 1960s?