C'est toujours oui quand elles disent non

This 70's cheeseball features Elliott Gould at his smarmiest, Paul Sorvino at his hammiest, and poor Diane Keaton at her most embarrassed. Plays like an extended episode of "Love, American Style." A snarky embarrassment.

Norman Panama co-wrote and directed this silly bedroom comedy steeped in '70s clichés. Bickering couple, married ten years and separated for one, are reunited at the wife's sister's "contractual engagement" and soon decide to have a couples-contract drawn up for themselves. Panama, a veteran of film comedies who for years teamed with Melvin Frank (who later went on to big solo success with "A Touch of Class" in 1973), doesn't quite have it in him to be ballsy or outrageous, so he settles instead for sniggering-lite. This works out all right for the film's first half, which gives stars Elliott Gould and Diane Keaton a chance to play sort of an updated version of Rock Hudson and Doris Day (he's a skirt-chaser, she's sexually-repressed and maybe frigid). But the second-half, a screwball outing at a California sex clinic, drops a big bad bomb, turning our likable leads into arms-flailing ninnies. If the characters had stayed right where they were, this might have succeeded as a raunchy variation on "A Touch of Class". But Panama was obviously after big, slapstick-y laughs and cartoony embarrassments. His cast says "I Will, I Will" against their better judgment. ** from ****

Either you like Elliott Gould's sexual roguishness or you don't. I do. I thought this was very very funny (though easily open to charges of misogyny). Gould's character is completely immoral, treacherous and very funny in his dealings with his wife and other women.

The movie has the feel of Portnoy's Complaint - a sort of "My history of women and my sex drive" - co-starring Brenda Vaccaro (who's quite good) as the wife. Gould's character will do and say anything to have sex with anyone to whom he's attracted - regardless of present ties or the future consequences - which can be laugh out loud funny. Will many be outraged at the unfeeling attitudes toward the women so taken? Yes - particularly women. I enjoyed it.