Taking off

USA 1971

Dir: Milos Forman

93 mins

Cast: Lynn Carlin, Buck Henry, Georgia Engel

Rating: R18+

To say that this is Forman's penetrating view of New York middle-class society and the generation gap may sound off-putting.  Basically, though, that's what the fragile story is about.  But the skill, compassion, and humour lift this American debut into the class of Forman's ironic and clever Czech movies that established him as a major talent.

National Film Theatre,  July 74

Milos Forman, the most gifted film-maker of the 1960s Czech New Wave, was in Paris when Soviet tanks rolled into Prague in 1968 and he stayed abroad. Before his second American feature film, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, swept the Oscars board in 1975 (the year he became an American citizen), he made this wonderful, rarely shown picture, taking the pulse of a deeply divided US during Nixon's first term in the White House. It looks at the generation gap as experienced by a middle-class New York family, whose teenage daughter has run off with a musician. Buck Henry (satirist, screenwriter on The Graduate and Catch-22) plays the conventional father who discovers a new countercultural world while searching for her. Smartly edited and partly improvised, the movie is an affecting, funny, accurate time capsule and features a hilarious sequence about the SPFC (Society for the Parents of Fugitive Children) in which Forman regular Vincent Schiavelli plays an effete hippie introducing middle-class parents to the rites and wrongs of smoking grass.

Philip French, The Guardian

Taking Off is a very compassionate, very amusing contemporary comedy about a NY couple whose concern for a drop out daughter is matched by her astonishment at their social mores. Milos Forman's first US-made film shows him to be a director who can depict the contraditions of human nature while avoiding tract, harangue and polemics.

... [Buck] Henry tackles his first big screen role and achieves superb results. Carlin seems not an actress in a part, but a real mother, caught by candid camera, who doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry about a family crisis.

Variety