Sunday, August 28, 2011

The Picasso Summer (1969)


Warner Bros.
Directed by Robert Sallin and Serge Bourguignon
My rating: 2.5 stars out of 4
IMDb
(DVD, Warner Archive Collection)

Albert Finney is a bored architect in San Francisco. Along with his wife Yvette Mimieux, they decide to go to France to meet his inspiration Pablo Picasso. They find his villa but cannot gain entrance. Yvette becomes bored while Finney goes to Spain to try to contact a friend of Picasso. In Spain, he learns to bullfight. There is a long sequence featuring a real bullfight that is practically unwatchable. The bull is killed in a barbaric, bloody ritual. After this escapade, Finney returns to France and his wife, never meeting Picasso. The plot, such as it is, features three animated sequences: the first is about war and peace, the second sex and the third bullfighting. They are nicely done in a psychedelic-Picasso style by Wes Herschensohn, his only movie credit during a career mostly spent doing layouts for Saturday morning cartoons. They should have substituted the bullfighting animation for the actual bullfight, as was done with the sex scene, saving us the sight of the bull lying dead in a pool of blood.

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