One Size Fits All

Julien Duvivier's "Tales of Manhattan" made during WW II is the epitome of vignette cinema in which an object passed from hand to hand (in its case, a formal tail coat) is used to knit together the pieces of the film. The late Candida Royalle adopted the same format for her delightful "One Size Fits All", a tale of a gown and the sexy women who wear it.

The feature begins with Candida's cameo, bringing the gown to a dress shop run by Tom Byron -she has no use for it. There follows a series of customers and borrowers who take the gown and wear it seductively over the course of five sex vignettes, the story inevitably coming full circle.

The sequences are titled: "Ignition", "Seduction", "Deception", Audition" and "Combustion", and the actresses all fulfill the viewer's dream-girl conception to provide satisfying eroticism. Candida is ever-tasteful, creating explicitly sexy scenes while avoiding all the clichés and excesses of mainstream porn, especially as compared to the gonzo/low- brow content that dominates Adult Cinema two decades later. As a writer- director she marched to the beat of her own drummer, and her work holds up very well to viewers committed to such antique niceties as: story, characters, tastefulness, and beauty.

Made back-to-back with overlapping cast from Royalle's lovely "The Bridal Party" feature, film benefits from the acting and sexiness of the unique redhead Melissa Hill, the pristine beauty of then-superstar Missy, the divine Shanna McCullough, timeless talent Nina Hartley and a very earthy, non-porno-like Italian import Gina Rome. Highly recommended for traditionalists, its virtues will go completely unnoticed by the current porno hoi polloi.