James B. Harris' Some Call It Loving never got the attention it deserved in the U.S.--its mixture of fairy tale and disenchantment scared off some critics here--but the film was quite popular in Europe. The central character, played by Zalman King, is a jazz musician who lives in a baroque mansion overlooking the Pacific. His world is inscribed by three others--two women who are lovers by night but who chastely re-enact his sexual fantasies by day, and a Black friend (played by Richard Pryor) on a drug decline. At a carnival, the musician is drawn to a Sleeping Beauty sideshow. Instead of waking the teenage Beauty (Tisa Farrow) with a kiss for a dollar, he purchases her for $20,000 and takes her back to his mansion. But “to wake the Sleeping Beauty, you run the risk of being awakened yourself"....
In his definitive article on the film in Sight and Sound, Jonathan Rosenbaum writes: “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, 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.... Some Call It Loving bears all the earmarks of an intuitive conception that has been developed, sifted and refined over a long period of time, reduced to a hard algebra of essentials which carries total conviction within its own rather singular terms.... (A)ccompanied by a score so sensually right that it reverses the usual pattern and seems accompanied by the images, (the film) has a style that can be comfortably described only through musical analogies: one of disenchanted lyricism, or of circular lament.”