I Love You, Alice B. Toklas is a 1968 American romantic comedy film directed by Hy Averback and starring Peter Sellers. The cast also includes Joyce Van Patten, Jo Van Fleet and Leigh Taylor-Young (in her film debut).
Harold Fine (Sellers) is a thirty-something attorney cornered into setting a date for marriage by his secretary/fiancée, Joyce (Van Patten). A series of events lead him to meet Nancy (Taylor-Young), an attractive flower power girl whom he falls in love with, which in turn leds him to begin renouncing aspects of his "square" life, but ultimately begins to believe that the hippie lifestyle isn't as hip as it appears to be.
The title refers to writer Alice B. Toklas, whose 1954 autobiographical cookbook had a recipe for cannabis brownies.
This film features examples of:
- Creator Cameo: Co-writer Paul Mazursky makes an uncredited cameo as a hippie on a sidewalk.
- Deconstructed Character Archetype: Nancy is a hippie that teaches protagonist Harold Fine to enjoy life and having all types of humorous romantic situations (which culminate with him becoming a Runaway Groom). The deconstruction is that, now that Harold is around Nancy for longer than a few (dope-filled) hours at a time, he is able to clearly see that she is a very shallow person and the hippie lifestyle is nothing more than a stoner hand-to-mouth existence that tries to sound spiritual. In the end he chooses to abandon Nancy and refuses to go back to his old life, finding them both empty.
- Intoxication Ensues: After Harold and Nancy spend a night together in his home, she makes him pot brownies. However, she departs without telling him about its special ingredient, and not knowing what they are, he eats them and feeds them to his father, mother, and fiancée, who dissolve in laughter and silliness.
- Ms. Fanservice: Nancy, who wears all kinds of lovely dresses, which especially accentuate her legs.
- New-Age Retro Hippie: Harold joins a hippie commune and soon becomes one of these, but ends up quickly disenchanted with them.
- Runaway Bride: Harold does this twice. The first time he's become enamored with another woman (Nancy, a hippie) during the wedding preparations. Amusingly, a minor subplot reveals the jilted bride, Joyce, basically gets over this. When Harold becomes disillusioned with Nancy and the hippie lifestyle at the end, he reconciles with Joyce and they attempt to wed again, but he gets cold feet at the altar once more (having realized he doesn't know what he really wants out of life). Joyce just says, "I knew it…"
- Take a Third Option: Spoofed somewhat at the end. Faced with the choice of confining-but-stable upper-middle-class marriage or free-spirited-but-superficial hippie life, Harold runs away from his second attempt at marrying his fiance from the former group. When asked by a passerby where he's going, he admits he doesn't know, and he doesn't care. He is determined to find a third option - the one that will bring him happiness.
