A brilliant film that helped define a genre

I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Blistering performances.

An unhappily married socialite (Julie Christie) finds solace in the company of a recently divorced doctor (George C. Scott).The cast is top notch. Christie is excellent and Scott never fails. And director Richard Lester has made some enjoyable movies. But none of these three is showing their best work here. It is middling, average... and wholly forgettable.I feel like maybe it had a bit more weight at the time, because there is the angle of the father who now has to compete for the attention of his children with their "uncle" (mother's boyfriend). That is pretty routine these days, but may have been more novel in the 1960s.

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.

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.

Like many movies, "Petulia" tells the story of a young woman (Julie Christie) unsatisfied with her marriage getting involved with another man (George C. Scott). The major difference is that this movie is set amid the counterculture of San Francisco in the late '60s - so why's she getting involved with an older man, I wonder. It seems like the movie's main point is to try and capitalize on what happened in the '60s. I mean, it's not like Julie Christie, George C. Scott and Richard Chamberlain were born to play these roles - although I can't imagine who else would play them.Anyway, it's maybe worth seeing once. "Lost in Translation" managed to elaborate on the idea. Also starring Shirley Knight and Janis Joplin (happy birthday, Janis!).