WHAT'S GOOD FOR THE GOOSE (1969) ** Norman Wisdom takes a deep breath and tries to leap the generation gap, or at least straddle it, or something. It definitely has to do with straddling, or leaping. Today no doubt the demographics team would explain, pie chart in hand, that much of his fan base consisted of ladies of a certain age, and that they would have no interest in his leaving his wife in face cream and curlers and heading off into the underground hippie bar in hopes of sticking his dick wherever he wants. And, for once, I do believe that the world might be a better place if he'd listened to that suppositious demo squad. Instead we get a film less interested in or focused on Norman than on his surroundings. It's probably the opposite of a good way or good taste, but the banker scenes do a good job of portraying a man who has painted himself into a truly dismal corner of life. I'm not entirely sure that the counterculture doesn't just depict the same sort of thing painted and lipsticked up a bit--in large part because there is some accuracy to the depiction that it too suffered from an injection of boring people. Music lovers (of a certain age and stripe) will thoroughly enjoy the performances by the Pretty Things. They've been properly buried in history by Jefferson Airplane and Cream and the Grateful Dead and..damn there were a lot of hot psychedelic bands then. People are still talking about that, no one remembers or cares what the bankers did.
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