David Clemens checks into a sanitorium. He freaks out whenever somebody touches him. He is anti-social until he becomes taken with fellow patient Lisa Brandt. When she speaks, she can only do it in rhymes. He starts communicating with her in rhymes.

The rhyming aspect is a little manufactured but I do like that it forces David to work to communicate with Lisa. There is a sacrifice and a quest to their courtship. I'm willing to allow for some artistic license. It's poetic and it also allows for an easy resolution. These two troubled soul are very sweet. They are a couple of wallflowers who find each other in the corner of a crowded room. This is a slow sweet little romance.

A few years before he played a certain astronaut on a jeopardized mission, Keir Dullea starred in "David and Lisa", Frank Perry's directorial debut. Dullea plays a haphephobic man in a mental institution, where he befriends a rhyme-talking woman suffering from a split personality. We'll probably have a different view of the depiction of the characters in the 21st century, as consciousness about mental impairments has expanded. Nonetheless, the performers really make the characters come to life: David is scared when anyone touches him, and Lisa (Janet Margolin of "Annie Hall") uses repeating sounds. This was one of the many movies that showed the new direction that US cinema was taking in the 1960s. Definitely see it.

Also appearing is Karen Lynn Gorney of "Saturday Night Fever".

At a time when films were becoming bigger and more expensive to fill theater seats in competition with the small screen, David And Lisa quietly premiered in the fall of 1963. A small black and white film with a dental floss budget it's about two young people in a mental health facility that only the rich can afford.

As such it's not a film that is truly representative of the mentally ill. Something like One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest is far better in that regard showing how people of all types and all types of neuroses are warehoused like cattle. This is a facility that only people of means can afford.

Keir Dullea and Janet Margolin who got their first big breaks in the title roles as a pair of kids at a combination of boarding school and mental health facility. Dullea is a boy with an all consuming passion for neatness and order who goes ballistic at being touched. Margolin is a loopy girl clearly schizophrenic who constantly speaks in rhymes. I think in her mind that's bringing a kind of closed order to her world.

We never see Margolin's family, but Dullea's is an eyeful. His father is distant and ineffectual. But mom Neva Patterson is the ice queen of suburban Republican women. David's here clearly because he's an embarrassment in her world.

The therapists are strangely passive. Clifton James and Howard DaSilva seem to be good listeners, but really don't offer much. James who played southern redneck types usually is almost unrecognizable. As for DaSilva he was coming off the blacklist and no doubt grateful for any work.

The film got two Oscar nominations for director Frank Perry and for Best Adapted Screenplay. But it belongs strictly to the leads Keir Dullea and Janet Margolin as David And Lisa.