J Paul Johnson
Carnal Knowledge is a film so thorny and prickly—prick-ish, even—it’s hard to love. I can’t quite see it as the kind of film a cinephile or even a casual buff would want to watch and re-watch: so loathsome are its two central protagonists, college buddies Jack Nicholson and Art Garfunkel, being in their company is literally wince-inducing. But as The Criterion Collection does at its best, here they take a little-loved film and situate it in its important social and historical contexts with a bevy of new special features, give it a 4K remaster, and make it a perfectly presentable special edition Spine #1270. As it turns out, Carnal Knowledge is a film that is far more challenging than its two lead male chauvinists.
The film was Mike Nichols’ third. Perhaps no director since Orson Welles had come out of the gates faster than Nichols, who began with Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Graduate, the latter winning him the Oscar for Best Director, before stumbling a bit with his Joseph Heller adaptation Catch-22 in 1970—a work many thought unadaptable. For his fourth film, Nichols took on a Jules Feiffer script, originally drafted for the stage, one that daringly took on the cultural politics of the sexual revolution of the era. And while there is very little sex—and certainly nothing sexy—in Carnal Knowledge, Nichols did not shy at all from the blunt facts and language of his characters’ exploits.
Nicholson and Garfunkel, as glaring a contrast in demeanor as they are in looks, share a college-boy horndog sensibility neither ever fully outgrows. We first meet them at Amherst College in the late 1940s, where the two roommates share locker-room talk in their separate twin beds. Garfunkel’s Sandy woos a Smith girl, Susan, played by Candice Bergen; she’s reluctant to bed him and eventually has sex with Nicholson’s Jonathan. Jonathan is nothing if not a player: he sees every woman as a tally, a notch on his bedpost, and leaves a trail of carnage in his wake.
The film flashes forward twice from there: first to a few years after college, when Sandy and Susan are married, but unhappily, and Jonathan is in a verbally abusive relationship with Bobbie (Ann-Margaret); and then again in the 1970s, well after both of these relationships have ended, and Sandy has a new 18-year-old girlfriend. For the two men, there’s no growth, no maturity, no development. Sandy is still dating girls the same age he was when he was 20, and Jonathan has nothing but a slideshow of his conquests he’s less-than-artfully named “Ballbusters on Parade” (including Susan) he’s happy to show Sandy’s gobsmacked young girlfriend.
If the film’s male leads are empty, vacuous jerks, the women—each of whom is coveted, bedded, then discarded—are more complex despite their lesser screentime. Ann-Margret’s Oscar-nominated portrayal of the abused Bobbie is heart-wrenching, especially in an expertly shot post-coital long-take medium close-up that demands the viewer pay more attention to her than her “lover.” Rita Moreno, Carol Kane, and Cynthia O’Neal are all excellent in smaller roles as well, but Ann-Margret’s is a tour de force from an actor once known mostly for her sex appeal.
The film’s artistry is subtle but effective: that long take of a sorrowful Bobbie is one of several smartly shot and skillfully edited scenes that slyly reinforce the script’s characterizations. Perhaps because it became embroiled in an obscenity case that went before the Supreme Court (the film was ultimately determined not to have violated community standards for obscenity), and certainly in part because its male protagonists form such a repulsive depiction of toxic masculinity, Carnal Knowledge‘s aesthetic and technical complexity is often overlooked.
And there’s where this special edition’s attention to the film’s social and historical contexts comes into play. Through its featurettes—interviews, archival materials, commentary, and essays—one can come to appreciate Carnal Knowledge for far more than its mere notoriety. I wouldn’t go so far as it call it a feminist film by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s also clearly not a film that endorses the toxicity of masculinity its protagonists project.
The 4K restoration, undertaken by STUDIOCANAL, was created from the 35mm separation masters, the original camera negative having been rendered unusable due to damage and mold. The monaraul soundtrack was remastered from magnetic tracks. Overall, its picture quality seems a bit softer than some other 4K remasters of the New Hollywood era, but its black levels are pitch, saturation naturalistic, and grain minimal. The 4K UHD disc frankly does not look significantly different from the Blu-ray version of the film: it would take a careful eye to discern one from the other.
Special Features
Audio commentary. Filmmaker and playwright Neil LaBute (In the Company of Men, Nurse Betty) provides the newly commissioned and recorded commentary track for Carnal Knowledge. LaBute, whose own work often enough like Nichols’ film depicts the casual romantic and sexual cruelty of men against women, is a strong supporter of Carnal Knowledge, seeing it like a domestic horror film. His commentary here sounds largely extemporaneous—he’ll occasionally interrupt a train of thought to comment directly on onscreen action. I’ve noted in other reviews that Criterion has been a little stingy with newly commissioned commentary tracks on its new releases of late, so it’s a pleasure to see a thoughtful new track provided here, not to mention one from a slightly surprising source. I wouldn’t have minded hearing LaBute in dialogue with another commentator, say Moira Weigel, whose booklet essay is eye-opening. No SDH are available for the commentary track, but one can toggle on or off the movie dialogue SDH during LaBute’s commentary.
Mark Harris and Dana Stevens. Nichols biographer and film historian Mark Harris (author of two of the very best books on cinema, Pictures at a Revolution and Five Came Back) joins critic Dana Stevens for a newly-produced 29-minute exchange, shot in the studio and intercut with high-resolution clips from the film, publicity materials, and critical response to the film. It’s an excellent and highly interactive segment with substantive contributions from both Harris and Stevens, focusing on situating Carnal Knowledge in the context of Nichols’ career and cultural redefinitions of masculinity in the 1970s. No subtitles are available.
Bobbie O’Steen. In this 19-minute interview segment newly produced by Criterion for this volume, film-editing historian O’Steen—author of the books Cut to the Chase and The Invisible Cut and herself an Emmy- nominated editor—dissects her late husband Sam O’Steen’s editing work on Carnal Knowledge. It’s an excellent, studied, engaging analysis of the art. O’Steen’s commentary, shot in the studio, is complemented by high-resolution clips from the film as well as a few seconds of screenwriter Jules Feiffer’s drawings and O’Steen’s late husband’s comments. No SDH are made available for this featurette.
Mike Nichols and Jason Reitman. This lively 36-minute interview from 2011, recorded onstage following a screening of Carnal Knowledge hosted by the Film Society of Lincoln Center, features Juno director Reitman engaging Nichols in a free-flowing discussion of the film’s cinematic approach and sexual politics. It’s a lot of fun: Reitman is funny but insightful and appropriately deferential to Nichols, who draws on his own reminiscences to shed new light on Carnal Knowledge for a 21st-century audience. The interview is a single-camera static and unedited two-shot of Reitman and Nichols together onstage. For this featurette, for no particular apparent reason (other than that the Lincoln Society may already have created them), SDH are made available. The subtitles are neither no more nor no less necessary than for any of the other featurettes in this edition (or any of Criterion’s English-language featurettes, for that matter. But they’re nice to see (pun intended) and serve to remind that the Collection should be providing SDH for all of its supplemental content.
Jules Feiffer. Yale professor Aaron Tracy introduces and presents this podcast episode of To Live & Dialogue in LA, recorded in 2019, featuring screenwriter-cartoonist Jules Feiffer (yes, that Jules Feiffer, in his time perhaps America’s preeminent satirist and who passed earlier this year) participating in a post-screening Q&A. The segment is 43 minutes long including Tracy’s five-minute, newly recorded introduction and accompanied by a single image of Tracy, alongside a drawing of Feiffer’s. At the time of the session, Feiffer was 90 years old and still sharp (he begins with a faux apology: “Sorry, I had to masturbate…. If only!“). No SDH are made available for this featurette.
Also included are a brief radio spot and the film’s original trailer, both worth a look. The double-disc clear jewel case packaging features two discs—one, the 4K UHD version of the film, the other the Blu-ray with the featurettes—alongside a 40-page full-color color booklet featuring two excellent essays: a feminist-revisionist reassessment of the film by scholar Moira Weigel, commissioned for this edition; and a reprint of a 1971 piece from American Cinematographer focusing on production designer Richard Sylbert and director of photography Giuseppe Rotunn’s contributions to the film. The cover art, credited to Catarina Sampaio, is direct and blunt, featuring four close-ups of the central cast separated by the film’s all-upper case title.
Criterion’s packaging of Carnal Knowledge—a controversial, divisive, and historically important film from one of America’s most prominent and successful New Hollywood directors—is in sum an impressive feat. Carnal Knowledge is a film I’ve never loved, but with the new remaster and several excellent featurettes, most of them commissioned and produced for this volume, it’s one The Criterion Collection has let me more fully appreciate. Nichols’ is a film that is far more than the simple sum of its two reprehensible male protagonists.
