The Great Final Song, James Coburn as a Little Boy, And "Ocean's Twelve" (2004)

Elsewhere I post "overall" on Candy (1968), but here I would like to salute its arty, incoherent, final scene...and the great rock instrumental that accompanies it.

Plot-wise, our title figure "Candy" (Ewa Aulin) is strolling endlessly across a 60's meadow and surrounded by generally hip, hippie, countercultural things and people and clothes and tents and scarves. She never stops walking.

As Candy walks, each of the movie's five major male stars(four of the movies, one , Ringo Starr, o of music) makes a final, silent cameo appearance(each appearance filmed with each star likely on a day when the other stars weren't there.) The staging is generally silly: Walter Matthau awkwardly riding a horse with a saber in his hand; Richard Burton playing with a snake around his neck as hippies laugh with him. Marlon Brando -- showing off a still-fit torso as a fake Hindu Mystic -- allows himself to be hoisted into the air in a "Jesus crucified" position that Brando turns into a slapstick struggle to get down to the ground to sexually pursue Candy.

But its James Coburn who gets the weirdest bit. His doctor is shown injecting middle-aged men, one by one, who enter a tunnel as men at one end, and emerge as happy little boys at the other.

Then Coburn gives himself a shot, makes the short trip...and pops out as a little boy himself.

There's something about that shot of the little boy I LIKE. The kid is dressed in Coburn's doctor's whites(actually blood PINKS) and he has Coburn's beard. But something about how the kid was directed is sweet and awkward. He stops, holds a pose, looks in the distance(likely at an offscreen director) and then runs off to pursue Candy even as he is now at least 10 years younger than her. Its a memorable little shot.

The "biggest deal" to all of this is that Candy's long continual walk -- and all of the star cameos -- are accompanied by a pretty rockin' psychedlic guitar instrumental that is catchy, exciting, exhilarating -- and totally of its time.

And in 2004, somebody remembered it: Steven Soderbergh. He put it over the climactic shots of his all-star cast in Ocean's Twelve(at once the most "Euro" and most disappointing of the Ocean's movies) and gave the great final song in "Candy" over to a much better movie seen by many more people.

But it was in "Candy" first.