I'm generally a sucker for British swinging 60's movies like "Blow Up", "Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush" or "Goodbye Gemini". Even some of the ones that aren't very good have their charms. There's nothing especially "swinging 60's" about this movie though--the kind of "free love", swapping relationship between the four ridiculously attractive characters could really have occurred in about any era (in fact, if it happened in the 90's, when I was this age, or today, it might even have had a bisexual element to it). This movie is light and airy like a lot of late 60's/early 70's film and definitely somewhat removed from reality (i.e. these characters have plenty of money but seemingly no jobs): however, it also eventually turns into a kind of leaden melodrama.
The story involves a pair of male and female cousins (whose mothers were identical twins) played by Hywel Bennet and Jane Asher. They are very much in love with each other, and if they had simply acted on it a lot of tragedy (and no small amount of boredom) would have been averted. But instead they decide to find each other lovers--a blonde Swedish hunk (Sven Bertil Taube) and a ditzy American bimbo (Leigh Taylor-Young). Of course, the two lovers eventually fall for each other as well, and there is also a much older English man, who is in love with Taylor-Young's character, thrown into the mix . A pregnancy and a subsequent tragedy complicate matters.
The problem with this movie is that, while the two lead characters are by far the more interesting and are played by the two better actors (Hywell Bennet was in both "Twisted Nerve" and "Endless Night" with Haley Mills, while Jane Asher, a former girlfriend of Paul McCartney's, was in the excellent British cult film "Deep End"), WAY too much of the story really revolves around Leigh Taylor-Young's character. Taylor-Young was VERY attractive,of course, which might be why no one ever realized she couldn't act worth spit (She was kind of the female equivalent of Ryan O'Neal, who ironically she would later marry). Even if she were a far better actress though, her character is simply too ditzy and shallow to care much about, and her male partner Taube is simply too bland. Taylor-Young does have a nice topless dancing scene after she freaks out at a disco, but it still doesn't begin to redeem her generally wretched performance.
This movie simply gives too much screen time to the less interesting characters and less talented actors and never really develops and utilizes the more interesting and more talented ones. The four leads and the scenery (shot in England, Spain, and Sweden) all look very nice, but the movie overall is somewhat less than compelling.
