David Reviews Mike Nichols’s Carnal Knowledge [Criterion 4K/Blu-ray Review]

Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:36:29 — 79.4MB)

A new release from the Criterion Collection represents yet another successful retrieval of an important film originally released by that company on the Laserdisc format they specialized in for 15 years or so before they started releasing movies on DVD. Carnal Knowledge, Mike Nichols’ 1971 follow up to Catch-22, functioned as a lightning rod for candid conversations and high-stakes legal proceedings in the immediate aftermath of its release and still shows plenty of potential for stoking fresh discussions and charged debates about how so many men relate to women in regard to sexuality and committed relationships. I had a chance to review the new 4K edition and this post is a collection of various clips I’ve made about the film, both recently and back in October of 2019 when I reviewed the film as part of my ongoing Criterion Reflections podcast that covers films published on various formats by Criterion in the chronological order of the films’ original releases.

For the sake of convenience and to provide maximal coverage of my response to the film itself, I’ve attached the episode to this post, which should include it in the CriterionCast Master Feed in your favorite podcast player of choice, or you can just listen to it here on this page. I want to thank Richard Doyle and Grant Douglas Bromley for their contributions from nearly six years ago – they brought great insights and well-informed perspectives into the conversation and made it a much more interesting talk than if it was just me speaking into a microphone by myself! We even got into the question of whether we thought Criterion would be willing to re-publish a film that was in many ways so centered on two men who brought so much casual misogyny and chauvinistic privilege into their mutual assumptions about what they were looking for in their relationships with the women in their lives. (Remember, the fall of 2019 was still the heyday of the #MeToo movement that rose to prominence just a couple years earlier.) Even though that question was obviously answered with an emphatic YES! when the package’s release was announced back in April, it made sense at that time to consider how Carnal Knowledge‘s biting dialogues and unblinking candor in depicting unchecked male privilege would be received by a younger audience that in many ways had been brought up with a much stronger critical eye toward so much of the received conventional wisdom espoused by Jack Nicholson’s manipulative alpha-dog Jonathan and his unknowingly codependent sidekick Sandy, played by Art Garfunkel.

For those unfamiliar with what goes on over the course of Carnal Knowledge‘s 98 minute running time, here’s my quick summary: Jonathan and Sandy are a pair of American college buddies in the years following World War II. We meet them as they are on the verge of young adulthood, with their primary interest consisting of figuring out how far they could go at any given opportunity to enhance their experience of sexual encounters with whatever women were willing to allow them to pursue their respective quests. Unlike Summer of ’42, a film that was pretty big at the time and touched on similar themes of blossoming sexuality among young people of that time, Carnal Knowledge was not content to remain confined to a particular season of a specific year. Instead, the film drops in on its male protagonists at crucial moments over the next two decades, zeroing in on life-defining junctures that occur in the 1950s and 1960s, finally culminating in a pair of scenes set in 1971, completely contemporaneous with when the movie first began its public screenings. The presence of Candice Bergen (as Susan, pictured above opposite Jack Nicholson) takes place in the early scenes set in the 1940s, while Ann-Margret’s Bobbie character (shown below) brings her own shattering vitality to the forefront when she enters the film (and more importantly, Jonathan’s life) in scenes that take place in the mid-1960s, after both Jonathan and Sandy have experienced both failures and successes in various aspects of their lives that serve mainly to embitter them toward the possibility of finding satisfying long-term stability in their relationships with anyone, maybe not even themselves.

In one of the clips I embedded below, I made the mistaken observation that Ann-Margret won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her portrayal of Bobbie, but she was only a nominee – the award that year went instead to Cloris Leachman for her work in The Last Picture Show. (That had to have been a tough call for quite a few of the voters! I know I’d be torn, though I think I’d be inclined to go with Ann-Margret in this case.) However, she did win the Golden Globe Award in that category for her incredibly evocative, unforgettable, and fearless performance of a woman enveloped in a web of relational toxicity that only traps its victims more inextricably the harder they try to fight their way out of it.

Tucked inside a densely packed slate of recently-published titles that could realistically compete for some of the most compelling releases of the year, Carnal Knowledge may run the risk of being overlooked by the likes of such heavyweight and long-anticipated entries like Killer of Sheep, Sorcerer, and The Big Heat, along with magnificent 4K reissues like Barry Lyndon, Brazil, and the The Adventures of Antoine Doinel box set of five films directed by Francois Truffaut. While I was deeply impressed by my initial viewing of Carnal Knowledge back in 2019 when I covered it on my podcast, I never got the sense that there were a lot of folks clamoring for it to find a way back into in-print status with the Criterion Collection. I’m glad to see that they’ve gone ahead and put it out there, especially in the waning days of another half-off sale at Barnes & Noble (and the accompanying price match offered by Amazon). I have to acknowledge that this may be a tough watch for some viewers whose experience might uncomfortably parallel the lives we see projected onto the screen, or who might find it painful to empathize with characters who never find their way toward landing on a satisfying resolution. This is in every sense of the word an “adult” film, one that is probably going to be most appreciated by those who’ve been through a few of these wretchedly awkward post-traumatic break-up encounters over the course of their years. I know that I’ll be surfing around on Letterboxd, IMDb, and various online review sites in the near future to see how Mike Nichols and company’s work is being received in 2025 once the disc goes into broader circulation. For now though, here are a pair of short videos from the past couple weeks to accompany the more extended response that Grant, Richard and I had back in 2019.

First, let’s start with this preview clip that I made the same day (or maybe the next) after I had just received my review copy from Criterion. I provide a more extended look at the packaging, especially noting the “more substantial than usual these days” printed insert, a 42 page booklet that comes with the film. I was delighted to see that! And the essay by Moira Weigel is excellent, let me confirm. (I had just glanced over the opening paragraphs when I made the clip.) It also includes a short “haul video” in the intro portion where I show the discs I had just recently brought home when the B&N 50% off sale began at the end of June:

@dee.ell.bee my preview of the upcoming #criterioncollection release of #CarnalKnowledge (1971) directed by #MikeNichols ♬ Moonlight Serenade – Glenn Miller

Following that, here’s my proper review of Carnal Knowledge that I posted on both TikTok and YouTube, and now here. I’ll embed the YT version:

Finally, I’ll carry over the links that I put together for the show notes page from my 2019 podcast for anyone who wants to engage more fully with what others have had to say about Mike Nichols, screenwriter Jules Feiffer, and Carnal Knowledge in years past: