Cactus Flower
by Gene Saks
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Actor: Goldie Hawn, Ingrid Bergman, Jack Weston, Rick Lenz, Walter MatthauDirector: Gene Saks
Brand: Sony
Cinematographer: Charles Lang
Editor: Maury Winetrobe
Producer: M.J. Frankovich
Writer: Abe Burrows
Writer: I.A.L. Diamond
Writer: Jean-Pierre Grédy
Writer: Pierre Barillet
DVD: Region Code 99
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); English (Original Language)
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: Anamorphic Widescreen, 1.85:1
Running Time: 103 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2002-04-23
Audience Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Studio: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
DVD Reviews of Cactus Flower
DVD Review: The Most Beautiful Flower
Summary: 4 Stars
It may be sacrilegious to say, but CACTUS FLOWER is a much better picture than those that Billy Wilder was making at roughly the same time. We watched this, then THE FORTUNE COOKIE in rapid succession, and this one wins by a country mile. I bring in Wilder's name because in some quarters CACTUS FLOWER has been looked on as a flimsy Billy Wilder rip-off, due to the use of Walter Matthau and also to the scenarist I A L Diamond, who worked wonders on the original Broadway play script to CACTUS FLOWER and really makes it bloom on the screen. (Only in the cramped dentist set do you feel that you're watching a play transferred to the screen. Could that set have been any smaller, sometimes you watch Ingrid Bergman try to figure out what to do with her hips as she nears a desk or filing cabinet.) Diamond squeezed this one in during the long wilderness years for Wilder, between the ragged comeback that was THE FORTUNE COOKIE, and the 1970 megaflop that became THE PRIVATE LIFE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES. Those two shows seem absolutely dour next to the radiance of CACTUS FLOWER. Maybe Diamond felt freed up from his own impossible to live up to legacy, and he could just be really dumb.
Well, CACTUS FLOWER has a Wilder sort of mise-en-scene anyhow, as Walter Matthau plays a swinging dentist who pretends to be married in order to deceive his young girlfriend, Goldie Hawn. All the actors play this out as though it were perfectly normal for a 60 year old guy to be "dating" a 21 year old hippie girl. Last week we watched Clint Eastwood's BREEZY where the exact same situation is played out as a problem picture, nearly a tragedy, and yet here it is a sex romp. Of sorts. Basically Matthau doesn't understand that his own nurse, Stephanie Dickinson, has been devotedly in love with him for years and years. And that she, Ingrid Bergman, is the woman for him.
I wonder if there's a code of reception for audiences in which we mentally dislike the pairing of the old and the young, so we're prepared for Matthau to switch his affections from Hawn to Bergman, and to let Hawn find romance with the kooky writer next door who saves her from a suicide attempt at the beginning of the film (shades of Diamond's APARTMENT script!) . . . What's great about Columbia producing this film is all the commercial tie-ins, the product placement which must have seemed super grating and cheesy in its day, but now floats somewhere in the comfort zone. For example, Goldie works in a Village record shop, and every album on the racks seems to be -- by Columbia records! (I should say, the majority of them are, but here and again a non-Columbia LP is shown, which must have been a triumph of artistic integrity.) And my favorite scene is the disco evening, where Ingrid Bergman invents a new dance called the "Dentist." Listen to the parade of Muzaked chartbusters playing in the background while the beautiful people show it off on the dancefloor--everyone of them a Colgems tune--"I'm a Believer," "I Wonder What She's Doing Tonight," really, if the Monkees had made an appearance I wouldn't have blinked an eye. It's a fantastic scene, worthy of Max Ophuls, let alone Billy Wilder.
Description of Cactus Flower
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