Cactus Flower is another one of those movies that beautifully captures and illustrates a sense of an era.   In this case, the era is the 60s, and "the 60s" really needs to be explained. 

When people refer to "the 60s", they're generally thinking of the hippie, flower power, protests and love-ins era.  But in that sense "the 60s" was actually the late 60s and early 70s.  Most of the calendar decade of the 60s was a very different time.  Cactus Flower is 'transitional', with one foot in the early 60s, and the other striding eagerly forward into "the 60s" in the recognized sense.

A romantic comedy based on a long-running play, Cactus Flower tells the story of a womanizing dentist who is trying to settle down and being stymied by his own lies.

The dentist is Dr. Julian Winston (Walter Matthau).  A middle-aged single man with a much younger mistress, he has made a habit of telling his girlfriends that he is married as a way of keeping them from angling for a wedding. 

But now Julian is in love, and he wants to marry his girlfriend, 21 year old Toni Simmons.  (Toni is played by Goldie Hawn in her first screen role, for which she received a Best Supporting Actress Oscar.  But Hawn was already famous before Cactus Flower, for her role as the 'Sock It To Me' girl on television's Rowan And Martin's Laugh-In.) 

Toni is a sweet girl with her own slightly-skewed moral code.  When Julian proposes, promising to divorce his wife and marry her, Toni starts to worry about the mythical Mrs. Winston.  Julian assures her that his wife wants a divorce too, but Toni isn't satisfied.  She wants to meet Mrs. Winston and hear it from her, and make sure that the Winston family is going to be alright.

So Julian has to come up with a wife.  He turns to his long-time nurse-receptionist, the starchy and super-competent Miss Dickenson (Ingrid Bergman, who looks marvellous).  Miss Dickenson (it takes us a while to get used to thinking of her as Stephanie) is Julian's indispensible "office wife", the sort of employee who is all business and yet takes care of her employer with perfect precision.  She's the one who buys him shirts when she notices that his current batch is getting frayed.  This task is really a favor too far, but eventually and with great reluctance, Miss Dickenson takes on the assignment and meets with Toni, posing as "Mrs. Winston".

But Miss Dickenson plays the role too well.  Toni is quite impressed by her dignity and graciousness, and is still worried about her.  Julian tries to convince her that his wife wants the divorce too, even going so far as to cast a scapegrace friend as his wife's boyfriend, but that backfires - the boyfriend, Toni declares, isn't good enough for her.  And quite perplexing to Julian, Toni assures him that his wife is still in love with him.

As the plot unfolds, the viewer comes to realize long before the characters do that Julian's perfect match is Miss Dickenson, while Toni is better suited to her next-door neighbor Igor Sullivan (Rick Lenz).  But wait a minute - now Igor is starting to seem attracted to "Mrs Winston"!

Cactus Flower is as fizzy and kooky as Goldie Hawn, and as witty and sophisticated as Ingrid Bergman.  It's a keeper.



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