Carnal Knowledge

Director: Mike Nichols

1971 / 98min / 4K DCP

Kane, aged but 17, dealt out a palpable hit in the role of the deceptively docile, hippyish teenaged girlfriend of Art Garfunkel’s morose middle-aged Sandy in Nichols’s Carnal Knowledge, made from a script by gimlet-eyed satirist Jules Feiffer, a surgically precise autopsy of the sexual hang-ups of the North American male that takes for its sample specimens two Amherst College roommates, played by Garfunkel and Jack Nicholson, whose parallel lives—fraught with sexual disaster—we follow from the buttoned-down late 1940s to the strenuously swinging early ’70s. “Often pricelessly funny and accurate… Merciless towards both its men and its women in order to reach some kind of understanding of them, of their capacities for self-delusion and for the casual infliction of pain.” —The New York Times