It’s the one sincere moment in the entire “Austin Powers” franchise.
Straight to camera, the international man of mystery announces: “Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Burt Bacharach!” Mike Myers and Elizabeth Hurley, atop a double-decker London-meets-Vegas tour bus heading down the Strip, dance to the strains of “What the World Needs Now is Love,” one of so many Bacharach/Hal David hits, with Bacharach at the piano obliging the audience with the first of three cameos in the Powers comedies.
That same song, which really is a lament for the scarcity of love’s sweetness, sealed the deal in the final minutes of “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice,” the pathbreaking Paul Mazursky smash from 1969. There, in the shining Jackie DeShannon rendition, it’s heartbreaking — a sober-up reckoning that concludes the story of two Los Angeles couples’ experiment in what Amy Landecker, in the Coen brothers’ masterwork “A Serious Man,” called “the new freedoms.”
