I Will... I Will... For Now (1976) User Reviews

"A Touch of Class" without the class...which is both pro and con

[moonspinner55 · 5/10 · 26 April 2009]

Norman Panama co-wrote and directed this silly bedroom comedy steeped in '70s clichés. Bickering couple, married ten years and separated for one, are reunited at the wife's sister's "contractual engagement" and soon decide to have a couples-contract drawn up for themselves. Panama, a veteran of film comedies who for years teamed with Melvin Frank (who later went on to big solo success with "A Touch of Class" in 1973), doesn't quite have it in him to be ballsy or outrageous, so he settles instead for sniggering-lite. This works out all right for the film's first half, which gives stars Elliott Gould and Diane Keaton a chance to play sort of an updated version of Rock Hudson and Doris Day (he's a skirt-chaser, she's sexually-repressed and maybe frigid). But the second-half, a screwball outing at a California sex clinic, drops a big bad bomb, turning our likable leads into arms-flailing ninnies. If the characters had stayed right where they were, this might have succeeded as a raunchy variation on "A Touch of Class". But Panama was obviously after big, slapstick-y laughs and cartoony embarrassments. His cast says "I Will, I Will" against their better judgment. ** from ****

Cool 70's Pepsi cans.

[mark.waltz · 4/10 · 15 December 2021]

Frankly, I didn't like either Elliot Gould or Diane Keaton in this 70's marital comedy where they try to fix a broken marriage through her idea of "togetherness" that has them basically Inseparable and her threatening to end the marriage even if he thinks so much as to go to a baseball game with his colleagues. They try it for a few weeks with few issues, and a few of those scene are amusing, but after a while, her expectations begin to get out of control and his temperament begins to rise. There's opera singing attorney Paul Sorvino and sexpot neighbor Victoria Principal, a former Playboy centerfold who happens to be married. She claims that she's about to be separated, but does husband Warren Berlinger really want that?

Another 70's sex comedy with a forgettable title song that you are forced to hear over and over, a neurotic wife and a potentially philandering husband. The problem is it's been done before and after and better, and the two stars just don't gel on-screen. Fortunately for Keaton, Woody Allen was just around the corner, but for Gould, overexposure had his career on the downswing in duds like this. Veteran comedy film writer and director Norman Panama seems to out of touch to really handle subject matter like this, and the discussions of their sex life is more embarrassing than funny.

George Tyne and Robert Alda don't really add much as the therapists, those sessions making you feel like you're eavesdropping, and this was the first time in a film where vintage New York City location footage couldn't save it. The film gets even more bizarre when they end up in California at a sex therapy resort, and you begin to wonder if the writers of this and other comedies were saying that since adults can't act mature and responsible that they might as well enjoy their maturing you're still acting like children. A ridiculous if on occasion only so slightly amusing film, this will test your patience to see if you could make it through it.

I Won't, I Won't...For Now

[jtissothatch · 1/10 · 24 July 2002]

This 70's cheeseball features Elliott Gould at his smarmiest, Paul Sorvino at his hammiest, and poor Diane Keaton at her most embarrassed. Plays like an extended episode of "Love, American Style." A snarky embarrassment.

Funny and outrageous look at a man's libido and marriage

[trpdean · 7/10 · 3 April 2002]

Either you like Elliott Gould's sexual roguishness or you don't. I do. I thought this was very very funny (though easily open to charges of misogyny). Gould's character is completely immoral, treacherous and very funny in his dealings with his wife and other women.

The movie has the feel of Portnoy's Complaint - a sort of "My history of women and my sex drive" - co-starring Brenda Vaccaro (who's quite good) as the wife. Gould's character will do and say anything to have sex with anyone to whom he's attracted - regardless of present ties or the future consequences - which can be laugh out loud funny. Will many be outraged at the unfeeling attitudes toward the women so taken? Yes - particularly women. I enjoyed it.