Coming Apart

In his first starring role, Rip Torn really earns his moniker. He's ripped and torn and on the way to a big, bawdy breakdown in M. M. Ginsberg's voyeuristic sex romp. Torn plays Joe Glazer, a psychiatrist whose pent-up proclivities find him moving into a studio apartment in the building where his former mistress (Viveca Lindfors) lives. Once there, he begins a seduction “experiment” that involves a one-way mirror, a couch, and a procession of sexually apt young women. Succumbing to his own predatory appetite, Joe becomes horrified by the emptiness of his conquests. His comeuppance arrives in the person of a former patient, played by a desperately determined Sally Kirkland, who deflates his fragile fantasy. Scorned at the time of its release, this prodding pic may have captured the painful collapse of sixties counterculture with too much provocation. Filmed entirely from behind the mirror, Ginsberg's frisky fete makes us voyeurs at our own love-in. The eyes have it.

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