All the Loving Couples

Released around the time of Paul Mazursky's superior BOB AND CAROL AND TED AND ALICE, ALL THE LOVING COUPLES is a degraded satire on the subject of wife swapping, a cheaply made exploitation flick that tries to pass itself off as social commentary. The story deal with around four sets of well-to-do suburbanites that indulge in wife swapping once a week. The movie unspools on a single Friday night, where we watch the protagonists drink, argue politics, leer, fondle, watch dirty movies and denounce racial prejudice. The performers lack the requisite talent and they are indifferently directed, with a scenario that is punctuated with show-stopping flashbacks that offer little more than cliched motivations and characterizations. It's all very dreary. The screenwriter, long time B-movie scribbler Leo Gordon brings a prudish (even puritanical) approach that places the film in a sexploitation "black hole" -- It is not sleazy enough to attract the intended tongue-wagging crowd and not clever or intellectual enough to attract an art-house audience.