Great Catherine (1968)

[ER]

Windows in time open, windows in time close, moods come, moods go, and in the late '60s the in thing seemed to be wacky comedies, like What's New P***ycat, and most anything done by the Beatles before they started downing LSD like Pez.

Great Catherine, starring a doubtlessly drunk off his ass Peter O'Toole, fits that genre well, being a screwball updating of a phallocentric Shaw play, that served mostly to tar and feather Catherine the Great, and perpetuate the idea that she slept with more men than Madonna, and via offscreen insinuation, probably more horses than Secretariat.  

As I watched it one Sunday in college, I thought, nothing could possibly be this crazy, and began to wonder if some fratter had spiked my 7-Up.

Well, I saw most of it again and realized, no, it wasn't as bad as I thought in 1997, but it did make me wonder what the appeal was in the '60s to make high energy brain-flight movies like these when all I can think when I see one is these folks needed rehab.

27 stars out of 61.

PS I'm amazed Bollywood never did a version.