Carnal Knowledge (1971)


Jack Nicholson          Jonathan
Art Garfunkel           Sandy
Candice Bergen          Susan
Ann-Margret             Bobbie
Cynthia O'Neal (II)     Cindy
Rita Moreno             Louise
Carol Kane              Jennifer
Cynthia O'Neal

Directed by:            Mike Nichols
Produced by:            Joseph E. Levine, Mike Nichols, Clive Reed


The sex lives and romantic relationships of two friends during a 25-year period are shown, from their 
college years in the 1940s through their middle-age in the 1970s.

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The film traces the sexual and emotional confusion of two men from their Amherst College days in the 
fifties through the Kennedy sixties, up to the Vietnam era. Jonathan, a successful tax attorney and 
Sandy, a physician, personify two extremes of self-delusion and self-aggrandizement: Jonathan makes 
the mistake of thinking sex is love, and embarks on a lifetime of sexual conquest; Sandy dedicates 
himself to the pursuit on an idealized woman and the dreamy spiritual completeness to be found therein. 
In Bobbie Jonathan finds a partner whose masochism compliments his selfishness and emotional ambivalence. 
Jonathan does not want her to hold a job, but neither does he like the fact that she spends all day in 
bed sleeping, or watching TV. Sandy falls in love with his first collage romance, Susan; they marry and 
have children. But Sandy is haunted by the fear that he was too hasty, even though he and Susan lead a 
happy domestic life and strive to reinvigorate their sex life by making love "in all seven rooms" of 
their apartment. With Jonathan's help, he enters into an affair with Cindy, a tough professional woman 
who turns Sandy off because she is too overbearing.