Critics reviews

Pretentiousness is in the eye of the beholder, of course, but there's nothing "mere" about Harris' adaptation of John Collier's short story "The Sleeping Beauty," about a man who purchases a mysteriously slumbering woman from a traveling carnival and brings her home to be his companion. On the contrary, Some Call it Loving is fully, aggressively pretentious, wearing both its fable-like aspirations and caustic cultural critique on its impeccably tailored sleeves.

Troy's hopeful quest for innocence gradually gives way to a chilling nightmare of tragedy and death. Harris's 1973 masterwork, long unavailable on DVD, is a canvas onto which every dreamer can project their own dreamscape—at the price of being illuminated by Troy's fate.

This agonised work of self-examination, the confession of an ageing Lothario imprisoned by habit and unable to break the cycle, ends with an image of Troy as a mechanised man, condemned to repeat the "Step right up!" patter of a carny barker. It's as harrowing a self-portrait as exists in American movies.

Of all of Harris's movies as a director, this one stands to gain the most from multiple encounters. And the immediate pleasures on display—the jazzy interludes, Richard Pryor's soused-beyond-coherence performance as Robert's friend, the hot-and-cold color scheme (blues and reds are everywhere)—are more than enough to make the prospect of a revisit tantalizing.

It's pervy as hell, yet somehow tender and absurd while roughly challenging the taboos that cult movies like this do. It's genuinely sexy rather than simply transgressive. The kinky-game of a plot is realized with a dreamlike tone about literally mixing up dreams and visceral reality. In other words, it's romantic.

Spectators who like to keep their fairy tales innocent, their pornography sordid, their allegories obvious and their dreams intact are bound to be disconcerted by James B. Harris' haunting Some Call it Loving (Pleasant Pastures), which pursues the improbabilities of dream logic to clarify rather than mystify, and tough-mindedly concerns itself with the processes and consequences of dreaming as well as its objects.