Boasting not one but two stupid titles, this unreleasable '70s film is merely an example of indie over-production back then, a situation which is way worse now that there are so many pointless outlets for badly made movies. Filmmaker Odgen Lowell does not demonstrate any feeling for the medium, but DVD distributor Code Red sets a low bar (one could not hope to limbo beneath it) for what it chooses to acquire and release, this one coming out paired with an unfinished stinker WHITE RAT for us unsuspecting fans of the obscure.
I have seen porn films (ARMED SEVICERS and FIRES DOWN BELOW typical examples) that treat our soldiers & veterans in a condescending or cavalier manner, but they seem to get away with it because one does not expect pornography (rightly or wrongly) to have any social conscience whatsoever. This more mainstream effort (it would qualify as soft-core pornography if it had delivered the goods, rather than just offering some teasing topless shots) is in very poor taste regarding yet another variation of ON THE TOWN, with soldiers in the Big Apple for the weekend, trying to get laid. One of its titles, CRY YOUR PURPLE HEART OUT, is obviously meant to be irreverent, but comes off as merely insulting.
Typical of unfinished or movies whose end money never came through (I have seen hundreds of such pictures over the years, at film markets such as AFM, Cannes and IFFM), the movie's structure is ridiculous. Three G.I.'s (the Code Red box synopsis refers erroneously to four of them for no good reason, even padding the synopsis) are in Manhattan treating us to touristy visuals of Central Park and environs, but the story has them only in twos, also for no obvious reason.
Constant factor is Steve (Ron Osborne), our affable hero who has hard luck with women. He's either with mustachioed pal Harry (Larry Jacobs), who's much luckier, or alternately with their fellow soldier Gregg (Richard Currier), and various situation sex comedy vignettes (usually set in cheap hotel rooms) are played out like banal segments of TV's "Love American Style", circa 1970. But that dumb show at least boasted a great lineup of guest stars, not the relatively untalented actors and actresses employed here.
The repetitive nature of these encounters with the fairer sex (including, inevitably, hookers) is a drag, and the director pads the running time with two digressions, which seem to belong to different movies altogether. First one is a mystifying short subject purporting to be a segment of the imaginary black & white sex film I, A WOMAN TOO, which the guys & dates go to see at the good old Bleecker St. Cinema (I haunted the place back in the day, when it still existed). I expected a mocking of Mac Ahlberg or perhaps Joe Sarno Scandinavian sex films so popular in the '60s but instead we get a puerile send-up of Fellini, replete with an ultra-busty (falliing out of her blouse) grotesque played by Janice Fuller in a vignette not unlike the main film's dumb situations.
The other ringer scene is more mysterious - Harry goes to visit the Outer Borough home of a cute girl whose brother's car he and Gregg have accidentally damaged during an unsexy picnic with gals sequence. The antics of the clan including a comatose old patriarch (who is subjected to violent slapstick) indicates our auteur was presumptuous enough to assume he could handle black comedy (think WEEKEND WITH BERNIE), which is patently untrue.
Casting is lousy, with the various actresses called upon to seem sexy or at least partially disrobe for the camera offering little appeal. Our trio of farceurs is even worse. Film has no ending (no shock to me), just Gregg & Harry and their dates disappearing into the bowels of Central Park in horse-drawn carriages (soon to possibly disappear into the mists of time as surely as the Bleecker St. Cinema, if our current mayor has his way), while Harry walks away with his own girl just as aimlessly, and thankfully "THE END" is slapped on the screen.
Rather thorough end credits include one for negative blowup, indicating this stinker must have been shot in 16mm.
