Rating: 
Summary: Well, it won't give you diabetes
Review: "This film business is very rude and cruel. If you are a weak person, it can destroy your mental." Ewa Aulin
You got that right, sister.
"Citizen Kane" finally made it to DVD. Who cares? So has "Candy"! To humiliate its "star,", Ewa Aulin, all over again. Anchor Bay's release of the 1969 film has lovely picture qualities. The colors are bright. The look of the film has been preserved and enhanced beautifully. There is depth of image. The film is garbage, but it looks great. It about destroyed my mental. I didn't take drugs in those groovy cool times. This is why. Because I would have conjured up something like this endless bag of hot gas. With this movie, I wanted nostalgia. I should have stuck a fork in my eye instead. Which, come to think of it, this is. "Candy" is based on the novel by Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg (just who was Mason Hoffenberg anyway?) which was a satirical, satyrical (it's the level we're on here) retelling of "Candide." Yeah, sure. That gave us an
excuse to read it in the Student Lounge and on the quad and to pretend we were culturally mature. HA! If our dorm room walls could have talked. "Candy"--the novel is--hot. Better even than "The Hand Reared Boy." Candide, Flandide, who cares? I circled the good parts in my copy with my pen. There were a lot of them. The movie, which I had never seen till this DVD, has no good parts to circle. Ewa Aulin was terrifically beautiful. She's got the stupid kewpie doll thing down pat. The second grade leer of the male lechers and the film makers is all here. STARS want to "deflower" her. Tiresomely. Charles Aznavour is a hunchback who crawls on walls and the ceiling, and he flies!! James Coburn is a mad mad cap doctor who performs bloody brain surgery to a theatre crowd, and knows the difference between a human and a spider monkey--which is apparently what Aznavour portrays. Marlon Brando is a guru with a far out wig and a dot on the forehead. He sits cross legged, and blithers, in his hippie dippie world in the back of a truck, with lots of neat psychedelic wall hangings, then, tumbles with our heroine, and blithers, as only Marlon can. Richard Burton is, well, Richard Burton, and he is truly funny in wonderful self parody. Walter Matthau is a mad quasi-military yoo hoo--and also is excellent. We've got wanna be fragments of: comedy, a bit of camp horror, an attempt at surrealism, an attempt at a fantasy, an attempt at knocking the Establishment (that made this movie incidentally)and those who did the knocking, or pretend they did. And a lot of irritating rock music of the time that reminds me why I hated most rock music of the time. Mostly we've got a stuffed turkey dead duck flailing around that tries to be everything the sixties was supposed to be over the place. Barbarella Psychedella--come home. All is forgiven. The BIOS on the disc list the various crash and burns the film caused. Including the start of Brando's downward spiral. So that's a good thing. But we don't see Ewa good and naked, and that's just cruel. I almost cried. Just close ups of parts of her, and a silhouette. They probably used a body double. There are some funny shrewd lines. And a few neat put downs. Mostly though it labors. The limp love-in at the film's end nails the coffin tight. "Candy" is of course stupid beyond all
measure. It wrecked careers. Embittered Ewa. It did the true deflowering of Candy Christian. But it would have been worth it for one crummy four second nude scene of her. "Myra Breckinridge" will be on DVD soon-- I just know it. Will I buy it? Of course. I'm something of a spider monkey myself. I can't help being happy I finally saw "Candy." But-- I think I'll go get a haircut now.
Rating: 
Summary: Believe me--it's just not that good.
Review: A hip and wacky sex comedy featuring Marlon Brando, Richard Burton, Walter Matthau, Ringo Starr, John Huston and a thousand other people, and based on a book by Terry Southern--sounds pretty good, don't it? Guess what? It's not. Candy is completely unfunny, if not depressing. Poor Richard Burton, licking whiskey off the floor! The various targets for its satire are the military (edgy!), surgeons (they asked for it!), mysticism (take that!), the police (burn!) and intellectual pop idols (huh?). The references to sex and drugs have lost whatever titillation/shock value they might have had thirty years ago, so don't expect to get much payoff out of John Astin with the joint behind his ear or the big transvestite scene. It's not particularly sexy, either. Who wants to see Walter Matthau, Ringo Starr or a hunchbacked Charles Aznavour manhandling a lobotomy patient? (I'm sure Ewa Ulin is/was a very nice person with lots of great qualities, but come on). Connoisseurs of the weird will prize this movie, but, to whatever degree one can be objective about these things, Candy is not a good film. There's nothing particularly fun, witty, or meaningful about it. It's just embarassing. And honestly, I've seen much weirder. Any ten minutes of Godard's Weekend is more bizarre, gutsy and anti-establishment than all of Candy. If you must watch sixties drug culture comedies, The Magic Christian is better.
Rating: 
Summary: Great blast from the Past
Review: As students 34 yrs ago we raved over this film. I haven't seen it since until I found it recently by accident at Amazon. What a surprise!It maintains all the amusement and freshness of a genre that is seldom executed so well in more recent times. To see some of the great actors in their youth again was a real treat.Scandinavian girls were all the rage in the UK in the 60's and no wonder!!!
Rating:
Summary: A serious movie that nobody seems to get.
Review: Based on the 'notorious' book by Terry Southern & Mason Hoffenberg (first published by French Olympia Press), "Candy" became an instant cult film when it was released. Not that this is superb or has atristic merits. On the contrary, the film is actually a hopeless case of loosely-constructed mansion which does not know where to go, or what to do. But the cast and crew included here is so impressive and the atmosphere of the film is so 60s-like, that you might forgive these fatal defects ... almost. Swedish Eva Aulin is Candy, a pudgey-faced, cute college student. In spite of herself (or because her innocence, I say) many guys are lured to her, mostly sexually, and shows their hidden side of character. The respectable facet of their career is torn down before Candy. Or, in short, they all want to taste candy. Many famous faces show up here; Richard Burton, Walter Matthau, James Coburn, John Huston, and Ringo Starr (yes, that's one of the Beatles). You see each actor one after another, doing some silly things, acting the part of showy professoer (Burton), crazy general (Matthau), super-surgeon (Coburn), his supervising boss (Huston), and naive Mexican (Starr). And finally, you see Marlon Brando as Guru Grindl. All these are meant for satire of the time, but looking back from now, the caricatures lost inevitably the impact. (Still, Brando's 'frozen guru' is funny even now.) More interesting is the crew; the director is a French actor Christian Marquand, whose CV includes "Apocalypse Now: Redux" (look for him in the French plantation scene which was originally deleted). Maybe I should not say this, but the film's slack way of storytelling is largely due to him, considering the fact that the script is provided by Buck Henry. But of course, Buck Henry can do mistakes. The greatest thing about the film is probably its soundtrack by Dave Grusin (!), which features the songs of The Steppenwolf and The Byrds. In fact, any Byrds fans should know the work, and the phychedelic rock sound is still refreshing and thrilling to hear. And the opening/closing special effects are by Douglas Trumbull, who is to direct "The Silent Running," and be the supecial effects supervisor of "Blade Runner."
Rating: 
Summary: Those Were the Days ... Loose, Slack Satire of the Late 60s
Review: Based on the 'notorious' book by Terry Southern & Mason Hoffenberg (first published by French Olympia Press), "Candy" became an instant cult film when it was released. Not that this is superb or has atristic merits. On the contrary, the film is actually a hopeless case of loosely-constructed mansion which does not know where to go, or what to do. But the cast and crew included here is so impressive and the atmosphere of the film is so 60s-like, that you might forgive these fatal defects ... almost. Swedish Eva Aulin is Candy, a pudgey-faced, cute college student. In spite of herself (or because her innocence, I say) many guys are lured to her, mostly sexually, and shows their hidden side of character. The respectable facet of their career is torn down before Candy. Or, in short, they all want to taste candy. Many famous faces show up here; Richard Burton, Walter Matthau, James Coburn, John Huston, and Ringo Starr (yes, that's one of the Beatles). You see each actor one after another, doing some silly things, acting the part of showy professoer (Burton), crazy general (Matthau), super-surgeon (Coburn), his supervising boss (Huston), and naive Mexican (Starr). And finally, you see Marlon Brando as Guru Grindl. All these are meant for satire of the time, but looking back from now, the caricatures lost inevitably the impact. (Still, Brando's 'frozen guru' is funny even now.) More interesting is the crew; the director is a French actor Christian Marquand, whose CV includes "Apocalypse Now: Redux" (look for him in the French plantation scene which was originally deleted). Maybe I should not say this, but the film's slack way of storytelling is largely due to him, considering the fact that the script is provided by Buck Henry. But of course, Buck Henry can do mistakes. The greatest thing about the film is probably its soundtrack by Dave Grusin (!), which features the songs of The Steppenwolf and The Byrds. In fact, any Byrds fans should know the work, and the phychedelic rock sound is still refreshing and thrilling to hear. And the opening/closing special effects are by Douglas Trumbull, who is to direct "The Silent Running," and be the supecial effects supervisor of "Blade Runner."
Rating:
Summary: A serious movie that nobody seems to get.
Review: Candy Christian is the blonde, blue eyed embodyment of Hollywood's image of female beauty. And, of course, everyone wants to score with her for all the wrong reasons. In the case of Ringo Starr as the Mexican gardener, it is for ethnic or economic revenge. In the case of the General, it is to breed the master race. And each of the others has his own axe to grind. It turns out that no one wants Candy for her individual qualities. They want her so they can make a statement, or because she is what Hollywood has instructed them that they should want. The untimate irony of the movie is that she (and by implication anyone else) who conforms to the Hollywood image of female beauty and is seeking romance is doomed. The genius of this movie is that such an edgy message - one that is easier to ignore than to recognize and bring up to the conscious level - is so well concealed in the medium of the very kind of mindless and plotless sex comedy which so frequently exploits the very same image.
Rating:
Summary: Still crazy after all these years...
Review: Candy is a mad movie and, after all these years, it is still a hoot! I'm not sure of its appeal to anyone under the age of 40, but for the 60's generation it truly is a swing down memory lane. The film was considered outrageous in its day but it seems pretty tame by "modern' standards. Ringo Starr received good reviews when the movie was released but in retrospect his performance is almost embarrassingly poor. But the incongruous cameos by a few of the biggest stars of the day are a great part of the film's appeal. (Remember, this was one of the first "X" rated films to be seen in wide release and, goodness, there were FAMOUS people involved!) Sir Richard Burton is riotous as are Marlon Brando, Walter Matthau and James Coburn, but the cohesive bond in the whole plot is the dual performance by John Astin who portrays Candy's stuffed-shirt father as well as her lecherous uncle, Jack. And, not too surprisingly, Ewa Aulin is still ravenously beautiful as the naive nymphet, Candy! Another shining attribute is Dave Grusin's soundtrack, very 60's, no doubt, but in the end it actually holds up better than film. Songs and incidental pieces by The Byrds and Steppinwolf sound fresh and invigorating. Younger people who want to experience a glimpse of the 60's "counter-culture" would do well to start with this trifling sweet, Candy!
Rating:
Summary: Eye Candy
Review: Ewa Aulin stars as the blonde beauty Candy. Her wide-eyed innocence serves her well throughout a series of brief encounters with a bemused group of movie stars. Among the cast, Walter Matthau particularly shines as an ultra-patriotic general who wants nothing more than a peek at her luscious body, but is soon demanding that she bear him a child! John Astin steals the movie in the dual role of Candy's square, college professor father and her randy, perennially pot-smoking uncle. How Mr. Astin failed to get an Oscar nomination is beyond me. Ringo Starr is totally unconvincing as a Mexican gardener, but his performance adds to the overall absurdity of the film. This "Candy" is very much an acquired taste!
Rating: 
Summary: Even worse than I remembered
Review: For those who appreciate commercial cinema at its worst, the is a 4-star keeper. I was one of the few people who saw and enjoyed Candy in 1968, given its brief time in the theaters. It was a strange movie then and now, with older eyes, it is simply a truly bad movie ... one of the many such bombs essential to a collection of that special genre: Plan 9 from Outer Space, Putney Swope, Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, Rocky Horror - to name a few. As a special twist, it is unmercifully long.
Rating:
Summary: Not quite mindless
Review: I actually saw this movie in a theater when I was young enough to be considered fit for active duty in the U.S. Army. In fact, I was in active duty in the U.S. Army. Most of my weekends were spent at Fort Knox, Kentucky, for my first several months of basic training, but I finally had the opportunity to go into Louisville on a Saturday night. I was old enough to buy hard liquor, and I was old enough to see this movie, and I did both in the same weekend. This was before I heard the "Thinks he's Audie Murphy" joke which made my experiences in the army so enjoyable, now that I have survived. The thing about Audie Murphy that was funny was that he got to play his own part in a movie, "To Hell and Back," after World War II, an event that was considered worthy of inclusion in history books in the 20th century, when most things didn't make any more sense than the movie, "Candy." Honestly, if you tried to tell the world that the United States hardly did anything in the big one until it had secretly built a couple atom bombs, and wouldn't even declare war officially on anyone until it was sure it would have a chance to incinerate a few cities before the ceasefire would end the opportunity to blow people away, hardly anyone would know that you were leaving anything out.
Back to Audi Murphy: the stars in this movie (would you believe that one is named Ringo Starr?) were given the opportunity to play themselves as somebody else, but there is something about the roles these people play that hyperbolically exceeds what anyone else could say about them. Like, who could imagine Richard Burton as a drunk lush, acting the part of stuporous impotence in the presence of young willingness? James Coburn overstating everything with exuberant pride might be expected, but how could such a clown, Walter Matthau, be the perfect caricature of what everyone thinks in the U.S. Army? Maybe it was such a shock to me because Walter Matthau seemed to be thinking what I was thinking, back in that theater in Louisville, Kentucky, when I was really in the U.S. Army, in training for a mission to hell.
Audie Murphy is not in this movie, but that might be because everybody said that after he went to Hollywood, he was nibbled to death by a bunch of ducks. I'm glad that DVD is the technology that finally made this movie available to historically minded people like myself, who need opportunities like this to see what everybody was thinking when we should have been growing up.
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