I Love My Wife (1970)

          Yet another would-be comedy cataloging the “difficulties” of being a successful white dude with a stable marriage, I Love My Wife stars Elliott Gould as Dr. Richard Burrows, a self-centered prick whose insatiable lust masks a deep reservoir of self-loathing. There’s actually a respectable character study buried inside the feeble jokes and wobbly attempts at sex farce, so viewers sympathetic to Gould’s shaggy screen persona might be able to cherry-pick this overlong picture and imagine a better film comprising only the most thoughtful scenes. However, doing so requires tolerance for watching Richard cuckold his long-suffering wife; objectivity and deceive his adoring mistress; and regularly ignore his two children, who didn’t ask to get born into a dysfunctional family. Moreover, those who track down I Love My Wife hoping for sexy laughs are bound to be disappointed—although the movie features a steady procession of attractive women in erotic scenarios, the protagonist is an unbearable putz.

          A prologue shows Richard becoming fascinated with sex during his childhood and, later, losing his virginity to a hooker. Then he meets and marries Judy (Brenda Vaccaro), but she falls from Richard’s favor the minute she reveals she’s not that into oral sex. Worse, she gains weight after bearing his children—hence pitiful scenes of Richard sleeping with a sexy nurse (JoAnna Cameron) and complaining to her that his wife doesn’t understand him. After that dalliance runs its course, Richard aggressively pursues a married model, Helene (Angel Tompkins), who leaves her husband to be with Richard. But of course she’s not enough for him, since no one ever will be. You begin to see how a serious treatment of this material might have clicked, and in fact most of the actors play the material so straight that I Love My Wife feels like a drama much of the time. Alas, it seems writer Robert Kaufman and director Mel Stuart were after hilarity, or at least satire. Viewed from that perspective, the movie’s an utter failure.

 I Love My Wife: FUNKY

The Great American Beauty Contest (1973)

          Like so many things bearing the Aaron Spelling brand name, this brisk TV movie about backstage intrigue at a fictional beauty contest is the equivalent of junk food—it tastes good at first, but regret kicks in almost immediately. The Great American Beauty Contest is very much a product of the producer who later subjected the world to Charlie’s Angels, because the movie comprises one scene after another showcasing vapidly attractive young women. On the plus side, the picture isn’t as sleazy as one might think, since there’s only one fleeting sequence of the contest’s swimsuit competition, and the lovelies in the cast represent an appealing collection of ’70s actresses. Spelling regular Farrah Fawcett is present and accounted for, as are Kathy Baumann (a buxom starlet in various B-movies), Susan Damante (of the Wilderness Family pictures), and Joanna Cameron (of the Saturday-morning superhero show Isis), among others. (Watch for a brief, wordless appearance by glamazon actress/singer Susan Anton in the final scene.)

          Although each of the aforementioned startlets gets plenty of screen time, the actual star of The Great American Beauty Contest is the elegant Eleanor Parker, best known as the Baroness in the classic family film The Sound of Music (1965). She plays Peggy, a onetime pageant winner who now runs the contest. When the picture begins, Peggy and her handlers greet various contestants, including Angelique (Damante), an innocent who believes in the fairy-tale myth of pageants; Gloria (Cameron), a quasi-militant feminist hoping to win so she can deliver an anti-pageant speech during her coronation; Pamela (Tracy Reed), an African-American upset about being treated as a “token”; and T.L. (Fawcett), a wild girl who enters the contest on a lark. Also in the mix are movie producer Ralph (Louis Jourdan), who serves as a judge and expects sexual favors from wannabes, and Joe (Larry Wilcox, later of C.H.i.P.S.), T.L.’s rambunctious boyfriend.

          Considering that The Great American Beauty Contest runs only 74 minutes (the standard length for early-’70s TV movies), Spelling and his collaborators include an abundance of “plot,” making up for in quantity what the project lacks in quality. Rest assured, however, that not a single frame of The Great American Beauty Contest will amuse, delight, or surprise. Instead, the picture functions like the broadcast of a real beauty contest—it invites the male gaze with a steady procession of bright teeth, lustrous hair, sexy curves, and twinkly eyes. And it’s hard to get too strident about a movie that not only features Fawcett doing an atrocious harem-girl dance, but also features characters commenting on the awfulness of said dance. In other words, The Great American Beauty Contest may not be an experience in truly guilt-free ogling, but it’s close.

The Great American Beauty Contest: FUNKY

B.S. I Love You (1971)

A pointless comedy about the romantic exploits of a TV-commercial producer, B.S. I Love You is the work of one Steven Hilliard Stern. As with Stern’s other ’70s endeavor as a writer-director, the Michael Douglas sports drama Running (1979), B.S. gets off to a bad start by asking audiences to root for a vacuous protagonist. Paul (Peter Kastner) screws up an expensive commercial shoot, and then compounds his insolence by skipping work for a long weekend that includes joining the mile-high club with a sexy free spirit (Joanna Cameron) during a cross-country plane ride. When he finally returns to his normal life, he’s rude to his boss (Richard B. Shull), whom he just let down, and standoffish with his girlfriend (Louise Sorel), to whom he was just unfaithful. Yet even though Paul is a self-centered twit who follows his bliss no matter the cost, Stern seemingly expects viewers to sympathize with Paul’s angst during endless montages of the character moping around while sensitive singer-songwriter tunes play on the soundtrack. Things get even less interesting when Paul leaves his agency to work for a company headed by beautiful older woman Jane (Joanna Barnes), with whom he promptly goes to bed—only to discover that his erstwhile mile-high partner is actually Jane’s daughter. Thus Our Hero finds himself torn between three attractive women, all of whom seem crazed to possess him, even though he’s a shit. As if this logic gap weren’t enough of a problem, B.S. I Love You is padded to the point of tedium (thanks to those endless montage sequences), and there’s no good reason for the film to be set in the advertising world since Stern misses every opportunity for satire. At least the first part of the movie’s title is accurate.

B.S. I Love You: SQUARE