Movie Review ‘Carnal Knowledge’: Mike Nichols Film Still Tour de Force 50 Years Later

Fifty years ago today, a film about deceit, bad sex, impotence, and misogyny emerged as the surprise smash of the summer box office. Written by Jules Feiffer and directed by Mike Nichols, the lacerating and brilliant Carnal Knowledge was released on June 30, 1971, and became the film everyone hated yet everyone had to see. It’s the romcom as horror movie, so bleak and brutal about human sexual politics that it touched off an obscenity case that went to the Supreme Court. Yet there’s no explicit sex in it; the film is obscene only in the sense that it’s nasty.

This is not a work for those who can’t latch on to a story unless there is someone to root for. Nor is there a point to the machinations it depicts, except to expose men at their worst. Its ties to theater are obvious, with its long takes and its monologues, yet when Feiffer pitched the idea as a play to Nichols, with whom he had worked on stage, Nichols ingeniously countered that it should be a film, albeit a film that felt like a play. Just as we do when watching a play, the audience comes to feel locked in a room with these characters. They seem right there in front of us, grubby and small, not enlarged by cinematic conventions. At many points, Carnal Knowledge (streaming on Amazon Prime) is almost too much to bear, and despite having seen it three or four times over the years, I almost couldn’t bring myself to watch it again for the purposes of writing about it here. It’s more frightening than practically any slasher flick.

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Kyle Smith

Kyle Smith is the film critic for the Wall Street Journal.

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Fifty years ago today, a film about deceit, bad sex, impotence, and misogyny emerged as the surprise smash of the summer box office. Written by Jules Feiffer and directed by Mike Nichols, the lacerating and brilliant Carnal Knowledge was released on June 30, 1971, and became the film everyone hated yet everyone had to see. It’s the romcom as horror movie, so bleak and brutal about human sexual politics that it touched off an obscenity case that went to the Supreme Court. Yet there’s no explicit sex in it; the film is obscene only in the sense that it’s nasty.

This is not a work for those who can’t latch on to a story unless there is someone to root for. Nor is there a point to the machinations it depicts, except to expose men at their worst. Its ties to theater are obvious, with its long takes and its monologues, yet when Feiffer pitched the idea as a play to Nichols, with whom he had worked on stage, Nichols ingeniously countered that it should be a film, albeit a film that felt like a play. Just as we do when watching a play, the audience comes to feel locked in a room with these characters. They seem right there in front of us, grubby and small, not enlarged by cinematic conventions. At many points, Carnal Knowledge (streaming on Amazon Prime) is almost too much to bear, and despite having seen it three or four times over the years, I almost couldn’t bring myself to watch it again for the purposes of writing about it here. It’s more frightening than practically any slasher flick.