A Touch of Class is a 1973 film directed by Melvin Frank.
Steve (George Segal) is an American businessman (he's in insurance) who works in London, and is married with two children. He meets Vickie (Glenda Jackson), a Londoner and divorced mother of two. Steve is taken with the lovely, quick-witted Vickie, and invites her out for lunch. Vickie is rather lonely after her divorce and eager for some excitement in her life. Despite knowing that Steve is married, she accepts an invitation to spend a week with him in Malaga, Spain.
The trip starts out as something of a fiasco. The two of them get stuck with a crumbling wreck of a rental car, and Steve throws his back out the first time they try to have sex. But soon enough they are making an emotional connection. Will the affair lead to true love?
Paul Sorvino appears as Walter, a talkative, annoying acquaintance of Steve's. K Callan is Patty, an American woman that Vickie meets in Spain.
Tropes:
- Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder: Steve admits that he is married then says "Never once have I been unfaithful to her—in the same city." He then claims his wife is "out of town." (She isn't.)
- The Alleged Car: Steve and Vickie wind up getting stuck with a crappy rental car in Spain, an absurdly tiny little vehicle that is continually shuddering and backfiring. Vickie's carping about Steve always putting the car in the wrong gear doesn't help.
- Beastly Bloodsports: Steve and Vickie go to a bullfight in Spain. Steve gets squeamish and has to cling to Vickie for support.
- Belligerent Sexual Tension: Some problems when Steve and Vickie arrive in Spain, like their crappy car, Steve's back issues, and the unwelcome presence of Steve's acquaintance Walter, lead to Steve and Vickie sniping at and arguing with each other. It's very clear however that they still have the hots for each other, even as the insults fly.
- Call-Back: Vickie and Steve's love affair begins when they share a cab. At the end, after they've broken up, she hails a cab at the same time a man does, just like at the beginning.Man: Would you care to share?
Vickie: Are you married?
Man: Yeah.
Vickie: You take it. - Calling Me a Logarithm: Vickie asks her hooker neighbor if she has any oregano. The hooker says "Christ, I hope not, I just had a checkup last week!"
- Camp Gay: Vickie's secretary Cecil, who has a very swishy, camp manner, calls everyone "darling", and lives in an apartment where the walls are painted pink.
- *Crack!* "Ow, My Back!": Steve hops on top of Vickie in their first night in the Spanish hotel room, and promptly throws his back out, screaming that he's having a "spasm". This leads to a comedy sequence in which Vickie, still stuck under a howling Steve, struggles to get out from under and grab the phone to call for a doctor.
- Downer Ending: Steve and Vickie seem to have found true love. But he isn't willing to get divorced, and their illicit relationship is growing increasingly tawdry, so they break up.
- Eiffel Tower Effect: The opening shot has the camera panning up from the Thames to show Parliament and Big Ben.
- Fat Best Friend: Walter, who, when he isn't droning endlessly about the movie business, offers good advice about how Steve needs to break it off with Vickie. Vickie describes Walter as Steve's "fat friend".
- Friendly Local Chinatown: Presumably to avoid being seen by anyone they know, Steve and Vickie get a love nest in London's Chinatown.
- Irrevocable Message: Played for drama at the ending. Steve, racked with guilt at how he's stringing Vickie along as his mistress, sends a breakup letter by telegram. Minutes later he regrets it, changes his mind, calls the telegram company and has it canceled. He rushes over to the love nest with flowers and groceries—but it turns out that Vickie did get the telegram after all. They break up for good and the film ends.
- ISO-Standard Urban Groceries: When Steve goes to the love nest apartment for the last time, he's carrying two brown paper bags of groceries, one of which has the required baguette sticking out.
- Meet Cute: Steve is playing baseball in the park (in London? Maybe with other American ex-pats?) when, while chasing a fly ball, he plows right into Vickie's son. Then the two of them meet again soon after when they try and hail the same cab.
- Separated by a Common Language: Vickie has a little of the snooty Brit about her and she expresses it by commenting on American slang. She observes that Steve has taken her out to lunch and then a hotel because he wants "what you Americans so charmingly call a quickie." Later, when Vickie's lack of enthusiasm after their first sex has Steve thinking he "struck out in the sack," an angry Vickie says "'Struck out in the sack' is I assume a mixed metaphor, probably American, and undoubtedly nasty."
- Shout-Out: Vickie and Steve both cry as they watch Brief Encounter, a melodrama about two married people that fall in love.
- Slap-Slap-Kiss: The insults and arguing between Vickie and Steve climax in a fight where they wind up flinging the contents of their suitcases at each other, along with the lamps and other fixtures of the hotel room. They wind up falling onto the bed and having sex.
- Thematic Theme Tune: Theme song "A Touch of Class" has the singer talking about how a man and a woman are interesting people with "a touch of class."
- Unusual Euphemism:
- The building where Vickie and Steve get a love nest has five apartments. The other four are all occupied by hookers, and all four hookers are listed with the last name "French".
- On vacation in Spain, Walter compares Steve and Vickie to two ships that passed in the night and "scraped hulls for a week."
