“Candy” was notorious on its release, and widely acknowledged by everyone who was in it, and the various actors’ biographers as well as generations of film scholars, as “the worst film” virtually anyone involved ever made.

The acting ranges from players who “get it” and pitch their performances to be at least lightly amusing  — despite the comedically incompetent director’s worst efforts — to “clueless.” The writing, done on the fly, is a red mark on the career of screenwriter and sometime actor Buck Henry (“Heaven Can Wait”). The sexuality in it is painfully dated and, well, rapey.

But context matters in pseudo-psychedelic satires like this. And it wasn’t just fear of being perceived as unhip or “square” that had critics like Roger Ebert embrace it on its release. Well it was mostly that, one suspects, but moving on.

Based on an infamously-bawdy 1959 best seller by Terry Southern that American schoolboys shared, hand to hand, well into the ’70s, it was a coming-of-age odyssey that sent-up American mores, sexual hangups and increasingly sexualized “girls” in a world of supposedly uptight but actually lecherous and predatory men.

Whoever thought of casting a Swede in the title role and shooting it in Italy with a not-really-proven French actor-turned-director probably ending up drinking himself to death. Because the movie doesn’t play. At all.

There is pre-digital camera trickery aplenty on display, from filming a sexual come-on (assault) below the glass floor of a Mercedes limo to a surgeon’s gloves being slipped on too gracefully for reality (they were filmed being taken off, and the footage reversed).

The players who knew comedy well enough to atone for director Christian Marquand’s clumsiness in the genre don’t embarass themselves. Leering loon John Astin of TV’s “Adams Family,” playing Candy’s school teacher father, who wants to protect his “naive” child from premarital sex, and also playing her father’s randy “with-it” New York uncle, is almost funny. Walter Matthau vamps up his always-on-duty Brig. Gen. Smight and James Coburn keeps his cool as a surgeon who might save Candy’s injured father if a little sexual quid pro quo can be arranged.

 “You’re trying to out-diagnose a world renowned surgeon who has attended eight institutions of higher education and who has more degrees than a thermometer!”

Whatever is in the novel (I’m a long way from my Southern-reading teens), that “”do this for me” and I’ll do THAT to you “transaction” is a bit of plot gimmickry that’s beaten to death here.

The film — which exists in a 1:41 cut on Tubi and “make it STOP” versions as long as 1:55 or 2:03 — finishes well, with a sort of “Let the sun shine in” gathering of cast and crew for a big, empty finale that plays as Felliniesque and which we saw a version of in “The 40 Year Old Virgin.”

The Big Finish is where we see Marlon Brando as an oversexed Indian guru wearing an aerialist’s harness, flying and kind of wanting to get down.

At the time at least some of this had to seem like a good idea. The ’60s were stuffed with satires, from “Dr. Strangelove” and “The Loved One” to “The Wrong Box” and Southern’s pseudo-companion piece to”Candy,” “The Magic Christian.” Astin’s teacher-character in “Candy” wears the name “T.M. Christian.” If ever there was a time for “Candy” to come to the screen, this was it. If ever…

Candy is a wide-eyed blonde teen who stands out in her midwestern high school, so much so that a visiting fake-Welsh poet, taken as far over the Dylan Thomas-top as Richard Burton can manage, is smitten and pursues her by offering her a limo ride home.

His driver is the retired boxer Sugar Ray Robinson. His pillow talk consists of “My need, MY NEED,” shouted over and over as he’s groping and grappling with the semi-compliant Candy Christian (Ewa Aulin).

Her father’s gardener, played by Ringo Starr taking his shot at a Mexican accent (“Oh nooo. Diss no good!”) starts to help Candy care for the passed-out-mid-rape poet MacPhisto, but gardener Emmanuel cannot resist her charms.

Dad interrupts that, summons his twin brother, and they resolve to ship Candy off to New York to “protect” her. Right.

Encounters with Mexican-American harpies out to avenge their brother (Starr), the mad, almost-always-airborne general (Matthau), a New York surgeon (Coburn) who plays to a literal operating “theater” “(“No one will be seated after the initial incision.”), assisted by his “It” girl nurse (Anita Pallenberg), an underground filmmaker (Enrico Maria Salerno) and a “Hunchback Juggler” (Charles Aznavour) who wears a ’60s vintage sound system on his shoulders and eventually that Indian guru named Grindl (Brando, not quite in blackface) all lead to sex or lewd negotiations for it.

The ethnic and homophobic slurs remind one that there are jokes that landed laughs back then that just don’t work now. And there are funny bits that almost every cut of this much-maligned, much-mangled movie leaves out.

The Dave Grusin score, with contributions by Steppenwolf, has a certain timely swing, and has been sampled in films since.

But the “story” never flowed, even in a sort of picaresque, sexual awakening way, even in the longest versions of it I’ve seen. As it was filmed in Italy, New York, Las Vegas and LA, it’s hardly surprising that the connections between sequences are rough or non-existent.

The print on Tubi right now is just over 100 minutes, and leaves out entirely the bit performance by legendary director and sometime actor John Huston, perhaps by arrangement of his heirs.

Southern, who was the most famous satirist of the ’60s, co-wrote the novel “Candy,” and had a big hand in making Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” funny. But that was A Stanley Kubrick Film. So Southern is probably best-remembered for this film and the more financially disastrous and almost as unfunny “The Magic Christian.”

That’s damning. The few laughs here are so brief and scattered that they shrivel up in their arid surroundings.

Rating: R, nudity, sexual situations, violence

Cast: Ewa Aulin, Richard Burton, Walter Matthau, James Coburn, Anita Pallenberg, Charles Aznavour, Elsa Martinelli, Ringo Starr, Sugar Ray Robinson, John Astin and Marlon Brando.

Credits: Directed by Christian Marquand, scripted by Buck Henry, based on the novel by Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg. A Cinerama/Anchor Bay release on Tubi.

Running time: 1:41