All the Loving Couples

Released around the time of Paul Mazursky's superior BOB AND CAROL AND TED AND ALICE, ALL THE LOVING COUPLES is a degraded satire on the subject of wife swapping, a cheaply made exploitation flick that tries to pass itself off as social commentary. The story deal with around four sets of well-to-do suburbanites that indulge in wife swapping once a week. The movie unspools on a single Friday night, where we watch the protagonists drink, argue politics, leer, fondle, watch dirty movies and denounce racial prejudice. The performers lack the requisite talent and they are indifferently directed, with a scenario that is punctuated with show-stopping flashbacks that offer little more than cliched motivations and characterizations. It's all very dreary. The screenwriter, long time B-movie scribbler Leo Gordon brings a prudish (even puritanical) approach that places the film in a sexploitation "black hole" -- It is not sleazy enough to attract the intended tongue-wagging crowd and not clever or intellectual enough to attract an art-house audience.

Originally X-rated, the independently-produced "All the Loving Couples" was advertised as "the movie that takes up where 'Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice' leaves off!" Not quite. Assorted heterosexual couples (uptight and bickering with each other about mothers-in-law and money problems) gather for a swingers' party at the house of a suburban couple in Southern California. There's a stag film and a game of Spin the Bottle, but the old sexual hang-ups (however realistically they may mirror middle-class society) keep everyone--including the audience--from having a good time. The wives get upset when their husbands eye the other women and green-eyed when their naughty-boy spouses get a flirtatious compliment (meanwhile, amongst themselves, the ladies break down marriage to one thing: material comforts). The movie is actually kind of stupidly amusing in that the minute the projector is turned on, so are our kissing couples (while being pleasured by one of the wives, a husband says "Can you do me a favor?... The buttons on your vest are killing me."). Screenwriter Leo Gordon manages to get his characters in bed/on the couch/in the pool, but the moral implications and repercussions of no-questions-asked easy sex are always at the ready ("I thought with you it might be different, but here I am, a damn eunuch!"). Meanwhile, director Mack Bing cuts away every so often for TV commercial spoofs (using his cast of non-loving couples as actors), pointing up the sexual references in today's advertising. They are about as funny as the most promiscuous of the wives telling her romantic-minded lover in the morning, "Look, I don't cheat on my husband." * from ****

I was pretty sure I'd seen all the "controversial" films produced in the 60's and 70's that really tested the MPAA's rating system, but this one I'd never heard of until now. It's a curious, low-budget effort about wife-swapping that received an X-rating upon its release. It has some clever, snappy dialog that at times almost takes us into a poor-man's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf," territory, and the acting is actually pretty decent (most notably by Norman Alden, who you'll probably recognize as a well-known character actor). The plot revolves around a naive couple who join a group of wife-swappers one evening. The wife is initially shocked upon learning of the club's proclivities, but after realizing this is an attempt by her husband to cozy up to the wealthier members of the group in order to elevate their financial status, the story begins to take other turns. This was released the same year as the similarly-themed "Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice," but ATLC takes the action farther. I can imagine all the T&A as well as the idea of wife-swapping was probably pretty eye-opening in 1969, but today it's pretty much just a curiosity.

There are some bizarre aspects to the film, however, that made it stand out for me. Every 15 minutes the film takes us to a poorly-staged "commercial" in which each performer advertises a household or grooming product; then the film continues as though we were watching a television show. I was unable to figure out just what the director was actually trying to say by doing this, and the effect is a little jarring to the film's continuity. It also tries to take a very liberal standpoint re: its topic, but then while the couples are indulging in their sport each male suddenly has a (overly long) black-and-white fantasy ranging from chasing/being chased by lingerie-clad women, trying to pull their own headstone out of the ground, or a menacing doppelganger watching his performance from outside the bedroom window... and at this point the film seems to take on a more moral and puritanical stance. I was able to find one more review to ATLC online, and learned that the film was reportedly helmed by a "swinger" himself. It's unclear just what his moral stance on the lifestyle was as the film seems to swing back and forth.

I would recommend this to anyone as kind of a time capsule of the 60's-70's sexual revolution, and I can't say I ever got bored by it. For a low-budget film of that period I thought it actually displayed some good performances and a well-written script. I can't recommend the commercials or the black-and-white fantasy scenes, however.