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Blume in Love is writer-director Paul Mazursky's best movie, featuring George Segal's best performance, and the sweetest film distillation of what made the 1970s a charmed and exasperating time. Yes, sweetest--though it's only fair to serve notice of a third-act transgression, and its aftermath, that will have some viewers hitting the Stop button. So be it. This comedy about a privileged manchild (Segal)--a Beverly Hills divorce lawyer--falling ever more deeply in love with his ex-wife (Susan Anspach) is clear-eyed and endlessly forgiving toward all its imperfect, achingly human characters. A milestone of the '70s "American film renaissance," Blume has only grown wittier and wiser with time. Segal and Anspach are perfectly cast as the California couple whose courtship, marriage, breakup, and postmarital relationship are recalled in scrambled chronology from Blume's vantage in Venice's Plaza San Marco, site of their honeymoon years earlier. The stars' quirky attractiveness, as opposed to conventional movie-star looks, suits the characters' glib, SoCal liberalism and sexual gamesmanship. (The couple meet at a radical-chic fundraiser for César Chávez and frug to a curly-locks band playing "Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man"--a zeitgeist moment to bring fond tears to the eye.) Kris Kristofferson is delightful as an out-of-work musician named Elmo who takes up with the ex-wife, then--to her bemusement--bonds warmly with Blume. There are also priceless dialogues with the psychoanalyst the couple shares (Donald F. Muhich, Mazursky's own analyst previously seen in Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice), and Shelley Winters has a hilarious extended cameo as an on-again, off-again client of Blume's. Nor should we neglect Marsha Mason, exuding great-gal warmth and carnality as the ex-best friend of the exes; it was her first film role of consequence, and just watching her in it made Neil Simon fall in love. --Richard T. Jameson
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