Mister Buddwing (1966)

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

hyped garbage

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

Mister Buddwing is the name James Garner's character gives himself when he wakes up on a New York City parkbench and starts asking people who he is and what he is doing there because he can't remember anything that has happened in his life, including his own name. The one name that seems stuck in his head is Grace, and as you watch the movie you start to realize that this is the woman in his life he is desperate to find. He runs across three women who remind him of the early, middle, and late stages of his relationship with her. Katherine Ross plays early Grace, Suzanne Pleshette plays middle Grace, and Jean Simmons plays late stage Grace. Each women play versions of their real selves as well when Buddwing first meets them. The movie goes back and forth between the real versions and the Grace versions in the middle of the scenes, which can be quite confusing. I had to press the rewind button more than a few times to get a handle on which is which, because the director, Delbert Mann, doesn't make it easy for you. By the end of the movie you figure out what happened to the real Grace and why Buddwing has his amnesia, but it doesn't really lead to a satisfying experience for this viewer. It's kind of an interesting psychological study of what a traumatic experience can do to a person, but not necessarily all that entertaining.

This is probably a spoiler. I watched the film wondering what reality was being depicted. The movie runs nearly two hours covering a span of maybe a dozen years. The man's (James Garner's) real time might have been anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours. Understanding that the entire film is the man's nightmare is the key to figuring it out. It seems that the movie was not really released in the US, I think it had little popular appeal because the viewer needs to think in order to understand it. I disagree with James Garner's assessment that it was the worst movie he ever made, rather I believe it might be the darkest and artsiest film he ever made. The man's name is Edward Volner, it took two viewings to figure that out. It is important to understand that the film is a recurring nightmare, pay attention to the opening shot and the final few seconds. The unhappy lower class house wife, Angela Landsbury, thrusting a handful of cash on him, Jack Gilford happily feeding him free of charge, the crowd that comes to his aid thwarting an over zealous policeman form a flash protest mob complete with signs; make little sense until the viewer realizes the entire film is a dream.

A man (James Garner) wakes up on a bench in NY Central Park with no memory. He has a phone number on a piece of paper. He calls the number and Gloria (Angela Lansbury) is woken up calling him Sam. He sees a Budweiser truck and a plane in the sky. So he calls himself Sam Buddwing. He goes to see Gloria but she doesn't recognize him. He thinks he knows a girl on the street calling out "Grace!" He follows her in a cab but her name is Janet (Katharine Ross). Although he recalls her as Grace during a long college romance. There is an escaped insane mental patients in the city. He notices his cracked ring is inscripted FROM G.V. He meets actress Fiddle Corwin (Suzanne Pleshette) who helps out the handsome man. Then he has a flashback with Fiddle as Grace and he's a musician as they struggle as a couple. A rich drunk socialite in a game picks up Sam. A memory is jogged and he recalls his life before he lost his memory.This could have been a great movie about paranoia. When the cop gets surrounded by a crowd and then they follow it up with a raving lunatic, I thought it was going somewhere interesting. I thought maybe Katharine Ross was actually Grace and she was hiding from him. That would have been a much better movie. This is rather bland. The end really has no tension. The flashback gets tiresome. The high hopes early on soon fades away.

This film would have been OK if it had been played for laughs but someone wanted to make a "serious" movie and it ended up a pretentious piece of crap. What were they thinking? When I saw the cast I was excited, three delicious babes and Maverick himself. Poor Jim Garner, his emotions ran the gamut from A to B. In fairness to him, however, Laurence Olivier could not have done much with this part. The plot was confusing and the film so disjointed that it was impossible to follow. Did the movie have a message? The scene where Garner finds the razor and blood all over the sink must be symbolic of a person who has seen this movie. As Tallulah Bankhead once remarked about a play,"There is less to this than meets the eye."