A Touch of Class

Melvin Frank, who wrote, produced and directed, starts from a small hard idea. Two adults agree to have sex with no feelings attached, set the terms like a contract, and fly to Spain to execute it. For about an hour A Touch of Class is a well-made comedy of logistics, of flights, hire cars and hotel bookings going wrong, and it is funny in the way things are funny when clever people are made to look stupid. Then Steve and Vicki come home, take a flat, and the film discovers it is a love story. It is much less sure of itself from there, and it shows.

Jackson is the reason to watch. She plays Vicki dry and quick, with a look that tells Steve she has heard the line before and is deciding whether to let him have it anyway. Frank and Jack Rose have written her the best dialogue, and she says the rudest of it in a level voice, as if reading him a bill. She is a designer who copies other people’s frocks for a living, and she has the same practical attitude to the affair: it is a job, it has a schedule, and she expects it done properly. When she loses her temper in the Málaga hotel room it is a full performance of rage, and it is the funniest stretch of the film.

Segal works harder and is given less. Steve is a man who thinks he is charming and is mostly persistent, and Segal plays that honestly, all grin and no listening, which is the right choice and not always a comfortable one to sit with. He is good at physical misery, and the film gives him plenty: a back that goes at the wrong moment, a car with no room for his legs, a flight with the wrong people on it. Paul Sorvino’s Walter is a warm, nosy, useful presence who keeps the Spanish half moving, and K Callan’s Patty does a lot with a raised eyebrow. Nadim Sawalha has one scene as the hotel’s night manager and gets a laugh out of every line.

The craft is modest. Austin Dempster shoots London in flat grey daylight and Málaga in flat bright daylight, with no interest in either beyond getting the actors in frame, which suits a talking comedy and does nothing for the romance. Terence Marsh’s hotel room, with its two narrow beds and hard tiled floor, is the best set in the film because it is built for an argument, and the Soho flat the couple later takes is cramped in the right way. Ruth Myers dresses Jackson in clean lines that look like a working woman’s own cutting and Segal in the slightly too-loud suits of a man who has just been paid. Bill Butler cuts the quarrels fast and the tender scenes slow, which is the correct instinct, and John Cameron’s score keeps out of the way. The theme song does not; it turns up like a relative and stays.

Here is what we felt. We laughed hard in that hotel room, at the beds and the back and the two of them shouting terms at each other, and we were surprised by how hard. Then, somewhere in the second half, watching them cook and bicker in the flat while Steve’s other life ran on unseen, we went quiet and stayed quiet. That is partly the film working. It is also the film running out of things to do. The scenes in the flat repeat one situation, a man trying to be in two places, and the situation does not change enough between repetitions to earn the time.

The question underneath, whether two people can have a sensible affair, is a good one, and the film’s answer is the one everybody knows before the credits. What it does not do is look at Steve’s wife, who is barely on screen, so the cost of the arrangement is felt by one party only. The Apartment (1960) understood that a comedy about adultery has to hurt somebody we can see. This one keeps the hurt offstage and hopes we will not miss it.

It is 106 minutes, it opened in Britain on 25 May 1973, and it is worth an evening for Jackson, for the Spanish hour, and for a script that still has more good lines than most comedies made since. Come for the first half and be patient with the second, and do not expect the ending to tell you anything you had not already worked out on the flight home.