Anything Once

Graham Place was a failure as a late '60s porn director, who much later has carved out a decent career as a production manager (often receiving a producing credit as bonus) on big mainstream films by Barry Sonnenfeld. This dull sex drama, which plays like "Joe Sarno for dummies" at its best moments, is strictly mediocre.

Writer-producer Don Walters has to share at least half the blame, since his script is an endless series of clichés. It's credited as being based on his book "The Passion Seekers", a title that more accurately describes (vicariously) the Adult Theater audience for this junker, rather than its characters. Walters ended up producing most of Sarno's execrable '80s quickie videos, nothing to be proud of.

Overwritten storyline is set in the Broadway theater milieu where producer Arthur Andrews, director Tony Gianelli and playwright Phil Masters are rehearsing a play. The sexual liaisons and hang-ups among the cast and creative trio make up the action.

Highly repetitive in structure, key incidents have to do with the play's leading man Louis Waldon repeatedly trying to rape his co-star Ann Wells. He even messes up rehearsals by being too sexually aggressive with her on-stage.

She's sexually repressed for reasons revealed late in the show, and becomes a lesbian lover of both her female co-stars in the play, predatory Uta Erickson and more sympathetic Linda Boyce. Uta and Linda are already lovers of each other.

With stereotypes abounding, so poorly written that the technically OK movie never appears to be a "real film" beyond mere porn, an idiotic happy ending is eventually delivered. After playwright Philip uses some old-fashioned blackmail to get the creepy Arthur to stop postponing the opening, the play debuts to rave reviews, and several cast members find the proper soul-mate. Uta is punished for being a sort of "bad lesbian" -her stage performance gets panned!

Basically director Place delivers full frontal nudity and enough groping to keep the adult fans, circa 1969, satisfied. Acting is generally phoned in, though Boyce, as usual, is an arresting presence, and Uta makes one sexy villainess, though forced to play most of the time in an ugly black wig (she takes it off at one point to remind us of her more familiar blonde persona).

Highlight for me was a sexy shower sequence of Uta and Linda, featuring Linda's breasts pressed up against the shower doors' pebbled glass -presaging Radley Metzger's classic staging of this gimmick in LITTLE MOTHER three years later. I probably would have enjoyed ANYTHING ONCE had I seen it back in 1969, as a sex film, and nothing more.