Togetherness (1970)

A dreary attempt at romantic farce that employs such hackneyed conceits as cartoonishly exaggerated class differences, wholly unconvincing fake personas, and a crass wager between would-be seducers, Togetherness teams C-listers George Hamilton and Peter Lawford with European beauties Giorgia Moll and Olga Schoberová. Yawn. Even the film’s Mediterranean locations fail to impress because the movie’s photography is so flat and unimaginative. In fact, nearly everything in Togetherness lands with a thud, so the picture represented a shaky transition to features for writer-director Arthur Marks, who previously helmed episodes of Gunsmoke and Perry Mason. (He followed this rotten movie with more low-budget flicks, including a handful of energetic blaxploitation movies, before returning to episodic television.) The interminable first half of Togetherness concerns horny jet-setter Jack DuPont (Hamilton) trying to bed voluptuous Yugoslavian athlete Nina (Schoberová) after they meet in Greece. Because Nina is a stalwart communist, Jack pretends to be a poor journalist instead of a rich playboy, but the courtship storyline makes Nina seem like a hopeless idiot because Jack’s ruse is so transparent. Eventually, Togetherness gets around to its real storyline when Jack and Nina take a boat trip with Jack’s friend, Solomon (Lawford), a European prince whose beautiful companion, Josee (Moll), pretends to tolerate Solomon’s infidelity. Solomon and Josee bet each other they can woo Nina and Jack, respectively. Hilarity does not ensue. To get a sense of how desperately Togetherness reaches for laughs, the most prominent supporting character is “Hipolitas Mollnar,” a boisterous Eastern European painter played by John Banner, best known as Sgt. Schultz from Hogan’s Heroes. Even by the pathetic standards of this movie, Banner’s relentless mugging is excruciating. Sluggish, tacky, and unfunny, Togetherness is so inert that Marks would have been better served executing the piece as a sex comedy. Lively and sleazy would have been preferable to dull and smarmy.

Togetherness: LAME