Glass Houses (1972 film)

The film's plot centres around the libidinous sexual shenanigans of a middle-class Californian family, and deftly explores themes such as marital discord, middle age, adultery, search for one's self, and incestuous desire. It is somewhat similar to the film Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969) in the treatment of its themes.

Victor (Bernard Barrow) is a bored, married businessman carrying on an illicit affair with his attractive, new age girlfriend Jean (Jennifer O'Neill). His sexually-frustrated, vivacious wife Adele (Ann Summers) involves herself with community civic meetings to do 'something' for the community.

Victor and Adele's nubile nineteen year old daughter Kim (Deirdre Lenihan), has a secret attraction to her father of which she cannot let go. As she cannot have her father, she takes up with a man of the same age, this being her father's business associate Ted (Phillip Pine). At one of her civic meetings Adele bonds with her neighbor, pipe-smoking sex novelist Les Turner (Clarke Gordon), and has an affair with him, albeit with ambivalence.

Events in the film reach a head when Victor and Jean bump into Kim, and her older lover at a health/new age resort. The pairing of Kim and Ted causes a falling out of the two men, and for Victor to reassess his relationship to the spirited Jean. The film concludes on a cryptic note with Victor coming home after leaving his daughter at her friend's house, looking for his wife. He is shown watching television in the living room, laying on the sofa, when it appears that Kim is at his side, or is she? Does Kim actually have her way with her father, or is it all just a fantasy, and if this is so, whose fantasy is it? The film's final sequence leaves this open for the audience to interpret any which way it deems.

Despite featuring some of the top character actors of the time including Phillip Pine and Eve McVeagh, the film has had a mixed reception at best. Reviewers such as Leonard Maltin pronounced the film as being a "low-grade drama about infidelity and incestuous desire [that] is mildly interesting in a lurid kind of way," (Maltin, 1991: 451). Vincent Canby from The New York Times was a little more generous, saying that "it is a fairly intelligent, perceptive look at a group of rather shabby people whose emotions are no deeper, nor more complex, than the movie that records them." (Canby, 1972). Clive Hirschhorn possibly made the most apt description of the film by saying that it was "a wryly observed poke at a libidinous group of middle-class nonentities," (Hirschhorn, 1989: 296).

Despite its director, the presence of actress Jennifer O'Neill, and being distributed by a major Hollywood studio, Glass Houses was never released on videocassette. As of 2019 it has also yet to appear on DVD or in other formats.

• List of American films of 1972

• Canby, Vincent (1972) Glass Houses New York Times, January 8, 1972. (accessed 25 June 2007)
• Hirschhorn, Clive (1989) The Columbia Story, Pyramid Books, London.
• Maltin, Leonard (1991) Leonard Maltin's Movie and Video Guide 1992, Signet, New York.

• Glass Houses at IMDb