For some reason I thought Tom Stoppard had a hand in it, but I was thinking of Terry Southern. Isn't that interesting? My memories of the film, which was played over and over again on the closed-circuit television network of the USS Forrestal during my 1974 Mediterranean cruise, were two: Richard Burton hoovering booze from the floor of his limo and Walter Matthau approaching Candy for sex in the cockpit of a military transport (this scene was repeated in Private Benjamin with Goldie Hawn). I vaguely remember Candy having sex with her comatose father, the appearance of Ringo Starr, and not much else. It's the kind of episodic story that functioned as porn in the late 60s--writers of porn didn't know how to built to a payoff, so they wrote a sex scene, moved the character to another situation, had another sex scene, and so forth (get a copy of The Devil in Miss Jones to see how it works, or Story of O, or Deep Throat, or anything of that era). Is there anything deeper to be seen in this movie? I really doubt it--it looks like a potboiler by a guy who has some bills. I don't have a clue how he got the stars to appear in it, but I'm sure Peter Sellers had a lot to do with that. And it's a gorgeous enough movie--the star is heartbreakingly beautiful and nubile; the sets are decorated with care. Terry's rep was looming pretty large with his Strangelove credit, too, so pretty much anything he ground out was bound to be printed and filmed. Whenever anyone wants to break out of short stories into novels, I advise them to follow this formula--write a series of related sex scenes. Write one a week for a year. Anyone can crank that much out. After a year, shuffle them and send them to an agent. Wait for the checks to come rolling in. What I don't get is why anyone would write about anything other than sex. It's all we care about as a species--having it, resisting it, trying not to think about it, trying to get it up, trying to keep it down, trying to get other people into bed, trying to get other people out of bed. Everything else is just window dressing. Candy is an important movie because it doesn't pretend anything else is important besides falling between the knees of a beautiful, nubile, not particularly bright young woman.