There's Always Vanilla (1971, George A. Romero) (Patreon)

48/100

Less dire than its reputation, but also clearly not how Romero should have been spending his time (which he speedily realized). Chronological technicality notwithstanding, this is entirely emblematic of the late '60s, no less a "We blew it" lament than was Easy Rider; I rather like its broad strokes, in which two young people briefly try and utterly fail to escape society's meat grinder after meeting cute—she literally bonks him on the head going through a turnstile!—and falling in love. It takes Romero fully half an hour just to get them together, though, and his separate introductions, constituting a quasi-satirical look at TV-commercial production and a semi-critical portrait of "free" love, meander along with no clear direction, indifferently shot. Went back and forth on whether Raymond Laine's performance is ideally or unbearably smug, wound up still perched on that fence. Judith Ridley (billed here as Judith Streiner), who's deliberately, maddeningly wishy-washy in Night of the Living Dead, gets to exhibit a much more forceful personality this time, but a certain deferential passivity remains—ingrained sexism, I guess. Anyway, the strongest stretch, in the middle, focuses squarely on the two of them, with Romero devising a splendid getting-to-know-you montage in which we hear several dozen questions asked, back and forth, without hearing any of the answers. (It's kinda like those supercuts of Jonathan Frakes hosting Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction, except with two people. So effective that I'm surprised nobody else appears to have employed it in the half-century since.) But screenwriter Rudolph J. Ricci apparently couldn't think of any dramatic development other than Lynn getting pregnant, resulting in a back-alley abortion sequence from which Romero unsuccessfully attempts to wreak horror. Movie finds the perfect ending (that super-macho beer ad), then inexplicably keeps going. A curio.