New Movies: Journey to Nowhere

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The caricature always assumes an air of superiority to its subject, the imitation one of inferiority. In I Love You, Alice B. Toklas, Peter Sellers gives a superior caricature of a middle-class American, but he is imprisoned in an inferior imitation comedy.

He plays an upright, uptight Los Angeles lawyer named Harold Fine with a surfeit of standard comic woes: asthma, a meaningless job, a possessive fiancée, a Jewish mother. One sunny day a psychedelicate girl (Leigh Taylor-Young) bakes him a bunch of groovy brownies from an Alice B. Toklas Cook Book recipe that specifies a few pinches of hashish. Harold promptly blows his mind and his job, puts on a hippie face and runs off with the girl. But as his hair grows down to his shoulders his troubles run up to his ears. Mama kvetches on the phone, 40 hippies move into his pad, taking over bed and bird; even his asthma returns. Harold discovers that he can neither retreat to Straightsville nor advance to Nirvana.

Along the journey to nowhere, Sellers displays a few glimmers of the comic genius that once made him seem like a chip off the old Chaplin, notably in a hilarious Spanish-Yiddish-English brouhaha involving his mother and eleven Mexican whiplash-injury clients. But most of the time, the movie reduces him to elephantine gestures and TV-sized jokes. As he runs into the fadeout, a passing hippie asks him where he is going. "I don't know," Sellers answers. "There must be someplace." The line sums up both this meandering movie and the flickering career of a gifted clown who has talent to burn but no taste in scripts.