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Someone I Touched (Lou Antonio, 1975)
Oddly, though most of
Someone I Touched’s screen time is devoted to the marital strife between Sam
and Laura, the most engaging and histrionic scenes, by far, involve the cashier
and her mother. The rest of the film, at least until a plot twist predictably
arrives at the start of the third act, hits overly familiar buttons. A county
health official crops up from time to time to rattle off statistics about VD and
to put the fear of God into us. The debates of feminism course throughout the
script. A philandering husband gets a verbal dressing down from a female doctor.
The abortion debate rears its head when the same husband implies that Laura not
have her baby. Women are revealed to be as capable at wrecking homes as men.
It probably goes without saying that
Someone I Touched is less than
masterfully made. Still, it stands as an entertaining time capsule of a culture
that has faded. The way that it manages to feel so quaint while it is convinced
it’s being frank and brave is one of the pleasures afforded by the passing of
time. From its hilarious dialogue (“Maybe the bug didn’t care… but I did!”) to
its faux sincerity, Someone I Touched
is wretched, but that barely keeps it from being enjoyable to watch.
Cloris Leachman sings the somewhat inappropriate title song in
a pleasant, lilting voice. 48 Jeremy Heilman 07.14.11
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Message
movie lectures rarely come more preachy than with
Someone I Touched, a made for
television feature designed to put the sexual revolution in its place. Chock
full of campy pop-psychological speeches, amusing fashions from the era, and no
shortage of delightfully overblown melodrama, the movie proceeds with enough of
a straight face to be frequently hilarious. In this single-minded enterprise, a
promiscuous supermarket cashier (Glynnis O’Connor) contracts a syphilis
infection and begins retracing her sexual steps. As it turns out, one of her
past conquests was Sam (James Olson), a successful married man who refuses to
own up to his misdeeds. Since it’s the 1970s, everyone seems to be having sex
with everyone else, which inevitably puts Laura, a happy housewife played by
Cloris Leachman, at risk. The potential of her inevitable infection, complicated
by her pregnancy, provides most of the suspense here, but it seems unlikely that
anyone won’t be able to tell where this movie’s going from the get go.