Plot
After a weekend of emotional honesty at an Esalen-style retreat, Los Angeles sophisticates Bob and Carol Sanders (played by Robert Culp and Natalie Wood) return to their life determined to embrace free love and complete openness. Bob and Carol happily reveal their ensuing love affairs to everyone, sparking both the curiosity and repulsion of their more conservative close friends Ted and Alice Henderson (Elliott Gould and Dyan Cannon).
When the two couples travel together to Las Vegas, Ted admits to an affair of his own. An outraged Alice demands that this new ethos be taken to its obvious conclusion: a mate-sharing foursome. But when they are actually ready to begin the deed, something within all four of them prevents it; the film never explains what that something is or may be. In the last scene of the movie, they are in the elevator coming down from their “trip”. They are shell shocked. All of them have woken up (in the evening) to their collective morning after. The music swells “...what the world needs now is love sweet love..."
Read more about this topic: Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“Ends in themselves, my letters plot no change;
They carry nothing dutiable; they won’t
Aspire, astound, establish or estrange.”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)
“If you need a certain vitality you can only supply it yourself, or there comes a point, anyway, when no one’s actions but your own seem dramatically convincing and justifiable in the plot that the number of your days concocts.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“After I discovered the real life of mothers bore little resemblance to the plot outlined in most of the books and articles I’d read, I started relying on the expert advice of other mothers—especially those with sons a few years older than mine. This great body of knowledge is essentially an oral history, because anyone engaged in motherhood on a daily basis has no time to write an advice book about it.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)