I'll Never Forget What's'isname

There were so many good British films made in the 60s ,that you rarely hear this one mentioned .Thou,it is a worthy film and is comparable to 'Performance' and 'Women in Love' as one of the best films of the era.It's about a Business executive who has to re-think his life and relationships for what they are worth. Orson Welles is great as his creepy Boss and all of the female actors who play his many girlfriends did a very convincing job. The Dream sequences are very LSD inspired.

If you like it also See 'The System' by the the same filmmaker.

Although constructed around "swinging " London this tale of futility in the pursuit of happiness endures. Oliver Reed will come as a surprise to most people who would not have thought the latter day hell raiser could deliver such a sensitive performance as the central character Andrew Quint.

A successful advertising exec Quint belabours the notion of a simple life and eschews the trappings of his current situation ( both professional and domestic ) to work at a small literary magazine with a friend from his days at Oxford. These trappings include two mistresses and an ex wife. The scenes with the mistresses are perhaps the least pleasing of the whole film.

"I never really saw the money anyway, it came in and went out ; if I felt like being successful I'd go and buy a new shirt"

A series of symbolic events unfold ( most notably a public school reunion and the pointless death of his new girlfriend )which only serve in Quint considering joining an equally exploitative competitor to the ad agency he quit at the outset.

32-year-old advertising executive in London walks to his office one morning carrying an axe, which he then uses to break up his desk before he resigns; his boss tries talking him out of it while his many women friends express concern for his future. Director Michael Winner and screenwriter Peter Draper eschew most of the clichés of the era's trendy surroundings for a somewhat more sober portrait of the upwardly mobile working class. Draper writes some very incisive dialogue (example: "Why is it these days everybody but me seems to be 22? What happened 22 years ago tonight?" .. "All the grown-ups went home to bed."). However, Draper's protagonist (played smugly by Oliver Reed) is hardly a likable guy. Handsomely-made film is edited with precision and was considered quite frank and provocative in its day. **1/2 from ****

Universal like many other American film companies came to London in the sixties.Films like this made them retreat back to Hollywood.Pretentious at best boring at worst.All of the leading actors died an early death due to one form of over indulgence or another.

Another 1960's collaboration from director Michael Winner with actor Oliver Reed, I'LL NEVER FORGET WHATS'ISNAME has an obvious and incredibly intended message from the get-go as Reed, a young and successful ad man, comes to work wielding an ax, destroying his own desk before quitting to his literally big boss Orson Welles, who, with every significantly-spoken one-liner, represents the evils of commercialism...

The movie feels like either a direct sequel to an original story showing how Reed's Andrew Quint became a success or that it started twenty-minutes in... Either way, with so much anger towards this occupation right off the bat... or ax... the writer has more things to say than the characters...

In this case Peter Draper of Winner/Reed's first and overall greatest joint, THE SYSTEM aka THE GIRL-GETTERS, which took time to flesh-out Reed and his cronies strategically chasing girls...

Not much different in Reed's specific case: while he quit a lucrative job for an old position writing for an indie magazine, he still loves (and is loved by) the ladies, including separated wife Wendy Craig, seductive lover Marianne Faithful and this film's innocent ingenue Carol White...

Who's the best thing going here... the POOR COW starlet playing a kind of comparably naive and ambiguous witness (the jerks are jerks and the good guys perfect idealists) for both Reed and the audience as director Winner... using surreal/psychedelic montages and flashbacks popular in this era, herein showcasing London's Swinging Sixties... traipses through a partial mind-trip sporadically weaving in and out of reality...

Before ultimately finding a genuine plot-line when Reed, forced back into working for the monopolizing Orson, finds his revenge by making a loaded, telegraphed thus predictable commercial in a counter-culture study that's often easier on the eyes (creative/intriguing visuals) than ears (forced/contrived dialogue).