verna-a As it's many years since I read the book I can't recall whether it had the same impression on me as the film, which was to profoundly depress me about the nature of man. The protagonist seems pretty much without redeeming features. He chases women in order to get them into bed, but seems to be basically hostile to them. He has friends in order to sponge off them. His sneering smile just makes me want to slap his face. I suspect however that this was not the intention of the film and we're really supposed to think he's quite a guy. In the context of the times the explicit language and sex scenes exploit a new permissiveness, but fundamentally it's an ugly and sexist depiction of men and women : the men trying to get sex with the minimum of commitment, and the women trying to pin the men down or get their money. It's really dated in this respect. On the plus side, I enjoyed the beautiful female bodies. The Parisian landscape shots also lift the ugliness from time to time.

JasparLamarCrabb Director Joseph Strick gets props for even attempting to film Henry Miller's expat manifesto. It's unfortunate that it's simply not very cinematic. Rip Torn is Miller, roaming Paris looking for a meal and sex with pretty much every woman he encounters. The film consists mainly of a series of amusing vignettes involving Miller & cronies. There's a certain amount of naughtiness with most of the interest derived from Torn's narration/reading from Miller's racy prose. Torn is fine and Ellen Burstyn plays his not so tolerant wife. James Callahan is outstanding as the least stable of Torn's friends (engaged to a equally unstable Parisian hooker). Strick & co-writer Betty Botley infuse the film with a lot of oddball characters.

rlcsljo Amazingly enough, Rip Torn's slightly off beat personality pretty much carries this film through. He seems to have a "joie de vivre" that seems to perfectly capture the attitude of an american expatriate in Paris. Mostly he fantasizes about older (35+) woman and his real or imagined conquests of them. A few young girls would have helped this film immensely (See "Tales of Ordinary Madness").The older actresses were all very good and spewed forth sexuality, despite their "advanced" years.I am sorry I did not see this when it first came out.

Scoopy In order to appreciate Henry Miller's style, it is essential to get a feel for the juxtaposition of his elegant, often heartfelt prose, and the profane nature of his subject matter. He is the modern Catullus, the poet not of "lovemaking" but of the joys of flat-out *****ing.The movie had difficulty synthesizing this sense of sacred and profane in harmony. It tried now with a Rip Torn overvoice reading from Miller's work, then with some poetic shots of the beauty of Paris. It never really seemed to succeed.The movie could never find anything to focus on. It represents a string of vignettes, and they don't seem to lead to any common goal. Many scenes seem to concentrate on the minor characters for much too long, and without apparent purpose. Such picaresque efforts rely on the charm of characterization for impact, and this film has some of that, but not enough. It's structured as if somebody said "let's make a film of Tropic of Cancer" without actually feeling any passion for why they wanted to do that.It was certainly interesting to see Rip Torn so young and so good-looking, and to see Ellen Burstyn in such a flagrant display of nudity. Some of the locales are accurately evocative, and Torn is reasonably credible in the lead. It is fairly explicit in the sexual scenes, and extremely explicit in its use of language.You could watch it and not feel you've wasted your time, but be advised that you won't feel much rewarded, either.