This comedy about a Manhattan couple's logistically hobbled move from one apartment to another was based on a now-obscure 1968 comic novel that probably would seem very datedly hip now. Like most such, did not translate well to the screen. So what we get is yet another attempt at something cool and offbeat that the mainstream Hollywood talent turns into a badly off-key sitcom. Even the novel aspect of Elliott Gould's protagonist being a dogwalker is stupidly handled for dumb yoks--if he's a professional, why does he act as if he has no idea how to control his canine charges?
Stuart Rosenberg, a TV veteran turned wildly uneven movie director (who was briefly mistaken for an important one when "Cool Hand Luke" hit big), was clearly the wrong person for this idiosyncratic material. it's hard to imagine who would have been the right person--maybe the Robert Downey of "Putney Swope"? But certainly few could have handled the potentially capable cast more awkwardly, or made the actress' frequent toplessness seem less "liberated" and more gratuitously labored. (You can practically hear the studio technicians' not-so-whispered comments about that broad's rack and this one's can.) The dream sequences and fantasies are puerile, and coarsely integrated; the "wild mod party" sequence is possibly the worst of that type ever, which is really saying something.
This is one of those movies that is mostly interesting in illustrating the haplessness of the period, in which so many adventurous and memorable movies were made, albeit amidst so many more little disasters like this one that flopped at the time and have been justifiably forgotten since. The industry was floundering, with the old formulas no longer working and no idea yet why some stabs at the "new" would be DOA and others click. Elliott Gould became the poster child for that waywardness, as the career heat he generated with "MASH" dissipated in a string of flops like this one. He works so hard here to pull the mess together, but he's not given a real character to play, or even a consistent tone. We don't know why his hero's marriage to Paula Prentiss is in semi-trouble at the start, or why it's apparently better again at the end; nor do we understand why on a whim he sleeps with Genevieve Waite as (what else but) a "kooky" English model met in the park. I guess it's all meant to be, you know, whimsical and free-spirited, but those are not things Rosenberg can manage. Instead, "Move" strains even to function as something more like a basic sex farce.
This movie is like a bad, limply semi-"counterculture" cross between Neil Simon-ish "Oy life in Manhattan is such a headache" comedies and the wilder satire of something like "Little Murders"--another Gould-starring flop from the next year, though an infinitely better film. It satisfies my curiosity to have finally seen "Move," but yeah, it's pretty much as bad as its reputation suggests.
