idler

Ripley, a slacker and a con man grinding out a living in postwar New York, is sent to Italy to try to persuade a trust-funded idler to come home and take over the family business.

His parents were socialists and in the Idler interview Reid describes his family’s belief in “access to freedom of knowledge, education, the whole alternative movement in medicine and health, and health foods but they were as likely to be on trade union and suffragette rallies as be doing rituals at Stonehenge. It was all part and parcel, which is something I’ve really tried to continue myself.”

“To me it was like a whole peak of 20th Century culture. It’s never been surpassed,” he told Idler.

In a 2008 interview with the Idler, Reid explained his feelings about politics, protest and art in the late 1960s.

There is an almost continuous succession of scenes in which Nicholson sketches this idler, lover, jokester, manipulator, con man, gambler, loner.