PETE ‘n’ TILLIE has a nice start: a leisurely pan shot at sunset, moving from the Golden Gate Bridge, taking in the city, the Bay, the hills beyond, Alcatraz Island, gliding back to the bridge and sundown. In 1972, San Francisco scenery figured in the four most popular comedies—What’s Up, Doc?, Play It Again, Sam, Butterflies Are Free and this one. It’s a comedy-drama, but what really differentiates it from the others is that they were actually funny and had characters you liked spending time with (and money on). Not so with this relentless downer, a synthetic, condescending wallow in glib smugness that was nonetheless a hit, thanks to the popularity of stars Walter Matthau and Carol Burnett. It runs 100 minutes: if you include the scenic opening credits, we bought maybe ten. *

The early 1960’s. Social flutterbug hostess ‘Gertrude Wilson’ (Geraldine Page, aiming to displease) introduces mousy  secretary ‘Tillie Schlaine’ (Burnett), thirty, single, virginal and glum, to ‘Pete Seltzer’ (Matthau), resolute bachelor, cynical product researcher and sarcastic enough to make a saint join the Foreign Legion. A blunt force courtship marked by its utter lack of charm, let alone romance, sees them hitched. They have a son (Lee Montgomery, 10, better recalled as the rat master of Ben) who gets ill, which soon turns the ‘comedy’ half of the movie, already gloomy, into a now-make-us-care drama faucet.

Matthau, 51, played a slew of comic louses and made them entertaining, even endearing. He could do straight hard cases (Fail-Safe, Charley Varrick), and early on, even outright villains (The Indian Fighter, The Kentuckian). But the snide, callous, unapologetically philandering jerk Pete Seltzer is the most thoroughly unpleasant person he was ever tasked with. Hanging out with a cobra would be more fun. In her first feature film since 1963’s Who’s Been Sleeping In My Bed? Burnett, 39, spends the whole show in one shade of funk or another; dumped-upon Tillie is more sympathetic than Pete (a roach would be) but she’s such a blank, one-note doormat that involvement is closer to clinical than emotional. Page is instantly tiresome (she somehow was Oscar-nominated in the supporting category) as is René Auberjonois as ‘Jimmy Twitchell’, the unctuous gay gossip spreader who hovers in and out like a mosquito. Was this the introduction of the Gay Best Friend cliche? If so, blame either Peter De Vries source novel (“Witch’s Milk”) or the adapting screenwriter Julius J. Epstein. As one of the famed Epstein Brothers, he’d helped whip up some classics; as a solo craftsman he was hit or miss, and this falls in the latter category. Sincerity is missing, contempt for the middle class evident. Fault also rests with director Martin Ritt, whose credits list is pretty spare when it comes to material requiring a light touch.

I’d never seen this, and looked forward to it: what a let-down. Along with Page, the screenplay went up for an Oscar nomination. Yeesh. The are two authentic things on view. One is a Mercury station wagon with ersatz wood paneling, one of those pre-SUV behemoths as long as a submarine. The other is a brief confrontation scene between Burnett and actress Timothy Blake. She plays one of Pete’s passing fancies, and has more appeal in a few minutes than any other character in the story or anyone else in the cast. **

With Barry Nelson (sleaze alert), Henry Jones (wasted), Kent Smith, Whit Bissell and Isabel Sanford.

* Tally woe—gross figures are another haywire scrimmage: the IMDB says $18,966,000, The Numbers cites a whisker shy of $15,000,000 while Cogerson, who we usually trust, goes for $24,500,000 and 14th place—13th if you count Deep Throat, which was about as amusing.

** Timothy Blake: her acting career from 1966 to 1998—which included parts in The Bad News Bears and Who’ll Stop The Rain—was superseded by extensive work in various executive capacities for the Screen Actors Guild, including being a former SAG VP, former SAG Foundation recording secretary, trustee and exec of SAG’s Pension & Health Plans for almost 30 years, and was co-chair of the SAG-AFTRA Film Society. Her brief bit with Burnett is one of the few bright moments in the otherwise sour Pete’n’ Tillie.

                           Timothy Blake