"As long as it accepts its conventional identity, it's as amiable as the Jewish middle class and hippie scenes it satirizes with a TV gag writer's sensibility. Toward the end, however, the movie gets all mixed up and, under the mistaken impression that it's as wise as The Graduate [1967], it runs off into an unsatisfactory limbo." - Vincent Canby, The New York Times

"Film blasts off into orbit via top-notch acting and direction. Sellers' performance - both in scenes which spotlight his character as well as ensemble sequences in which everyone is balanced nicely - is an outstanding blend of warmth, sensitivity, disillusion and optimism." -- Variety

"Along the journey to nowhere, Sellers displays a few glimmers of the comic genius that once made him seem like a chip off the old Chaplin. But most of the time, the movie reduces him to elephantine gestures and TV-sized jokes." -- Time

"The first half of the film is the best, as Sellers gradually bends the middle-class into non-class...This kind of stuff is good and pretty close to the mark, and Sellers is very funny. Unfortunately, the movie's general approach to hippiedom is what we've come to dread. Hippies wear funny clothes, sleep on the stove, don't wash, read the Los Angeles Free Press, bake pot brownies, put up posters everywhere and operate with a sort of mindless, directionless love ethic. So the movie becomes conventional after all. If they'd dropped Sellers into a real hippie culture, we might really have had a movie here." - Roger Ebert, The Chicago Tribune

AWARDS & HONORS

Leigh Taylor-Young was nominated for a Golden Globe for Most Promising Newcomer - Female. She lost to Olivia Hussey in Romeo and Juliette and Marianne McAndrew in Island of the Blue Dolphins.

Paul Mazursky and Larry Tucker received two nominations from the Writers Guild of America, one for Best Written American Comedy and another for Best Written American Original Screenplay. They lost the former to Neil Simon's script for The Odd Couple and the latter to Mel Brooks's script for The Producers.

By Frank Miller