April 1: Drop A Bomb- Please share your favorite critical and financial flop with us!

I’m obsessed not just by flops but by the late 1960s and early 1970s, when Hollywood wanted to figure out how to get the kids into theaters. Easy Rider was a hit, so they financed movies like The Last Movie, Head,  Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, Skidoo, Zabriskie Point and so many more.

This felt like a can’t miss: the novel Candy by Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg using the name Maxwell Kenton. They got paid $500 by Olympia Press, the same people who printed the first edition of Lolita. They wrote it chapter by chapter, trading things back and forth. They were amazed that it became a big deal, as Hoffenberg said, “Do you remember what kind of shit people were saying? One guy wrote a review about how Candy was a satire on Candide. So, right away, I went back and reread Voltaire to see if he was right. That’s what happens to you. It’s as if you vomit in the gutter and everybody starts saying it’s the greatest new art form, so you go back to see it, and, by God, you have to agree.”

Candy Christian is a Midwestern girl who just wants to make people happy. Of course, being an eighteen-year-old and gorgeous blonde, most of them want to have sex with her, then own her. She wants to make love to the gardener, but that leads to her father nearly dying from a concussion and adventures that will take her around the world.

Originally, Frank Perry—who directed The Swimmer—was going to make this, and Hayley Mills would play Candy. Her father wouldn’t let her play the role, so Christian Macquand got the rights. He’d just helped Marlon Brando buy his island—Brando’s son was named for him—and that got the great actor on board, as well as other big-time box office names.

In Patrick McGilligan’s Backstory 3: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 60s, Southern said that the director “disappointed me by casting a Swedish for the lead role, which was uniquely American and midwestern. He thought this would make Candy’s appeal more universal. That’s when I withdrew from the film.”

That Swedish girl is Ewa Aulin, who is naturally attractive and had already been in the Tinto Brass giallo Col cuore in gola and Giulio Questi’s Death Laid an Egg. Aulin would only be in one other movie that U.S. audiences may see, Start the Revolution Without Me, before appearing in her husband John Shadow’s Microscopic Liquid Subway to Oblivion and Italian films including The Double, When Love Is Lust, Legend of Blood Castle, Death Smiles on a Murderer and Una vita lunga un giorno. By 23, she had tired of acting, divorced Shadow, and met real-estate developer Cesare Paladino. She had two daughters and became a schoolteacher.

Buck Henry took over the script, and the movie got made.

The film starts with Candy daydreaming in her father’s (John Astin) class; she soon falls for the charms of the poet MacPhisto (Richard Burton), who is too drunk to make love to her. The gardener, Emmanuelle (Ringo Starr), attacks her, and she gives in; when his family finds out — he was about to be a priest — they are attacked by his sisters Lolita (Florinda Bolkan in her first movie), Conchitya (Marilù Tolo!) and Marquita (Nicoletta Machiavelli!). Her father gets a brain injury and she goes off with his brother (also Astin) and his wife Livia (Elsa Martinelli), but not before she’s nearly impregnanted by Brigadier General Smight (Walter Matthau) and lusted after by the man who saves her father’s life, Dr. Abraham Krankheit (James Coburn), and filmed by Jonathan J. John (Enrico Maria Salerno). Oh yeah- the doctor’s nurse is Rolling Stones muse Anita Pallenberg.

She meets many men — a hunchback (Charles Aznavour), a guru (Brando, who its said tried to have sex with her for real on camera) and another guru who enlightens her before its revealed that it’s her father and yes, they have just had sex — and by the end, wanders through a field of hippies and flies into space.

Southern said, “The film version of Candy is proof positive of everything rotten you ever heard about major studio production. They are absolutely compelled to botch everything original to the extent that it is no longer even vaguely recognizable.”

Brando said that this was the worst movie he ever made. But man, this excerpt from Marlon: A Portrait Of The Rebel As An Artist by Bob Thomas is just insane: “Brando, of course, wanted his portion of the script rewritten. The screenwriter was Buck Henry, a gifted young comedy stylist who had written The Graduate for the screen. Brandovisitedt Henry at the Plaza Athenee Hotel in Paris accompanied by the French moneyman for Candy, Peter Zoref, a conspiratorial-looking man who wore dark glasses indoors and out. The two visitors found Henry suffering from food poisoning. Henry tried to defer the conference, but Brando insisted on continuing, even while the writer went to the bathroom. While Henry retched, Brando shouted comments about how the comedy elements of his sequence could be heightened. There was a brief silence from within, and Brando opened the bathroom door to find Henry nearly unconscious, hunched over the toilet. Brando lifted the slender writer into his arms, carried him into the bedroom, and laid him out on the bed. Brando sat beside him and continued reading from the script and making suggestions to increase the hilarity. Zoref remained stolid behind his dark glasses, occasionally puffing on a cigar. A knock came on the door, and a waiter entered to remove the dinner tray. He stopped and surveyed the scene with open mouth: an (alleged) American gangster sitting in a chair like a stuffed figure, a thin corpse stretched out on the bed, a famous movie star sitting on the bed and guffawing over pages he was reading. The waiter slowly turned and walked out the door, closing it quietly behind him.”

This is the kind of movie that today gets one-star hate reviews by hip kids on Letterboxd who can’t be bothered to write much more than a sentence. It didn’t fare that well when it was released, either. But man, it’s a mess, a glorious mess, but one that has Coburn being incredible, famous people acting like morons and Aulin being some kind of android angel who has floated into this movie and bewitched everyone. She married Shadow while making this, a rock star who would one day write the 3D Matt Cimber martial arts movie Tiger Man.

So yeah, it’s a mess, but I love it for that. This is from a time when people were not afraid to fail and would throw money at projects that made no sense. Hollywood emerged from years of musicals and Westerns to try and become cinema, only to fall into blockbusters. But this emerged, a movie shot in France and Italy that looks luscious and yet is dumb throughout, a perfect blend of overindulgence and underwatched.

You can watch this on Tubi.