At a Paris cafe Errol Flynn was once observed breaking out in tears... "for all the women I'll never sleep with," he's rumored to have said. Such an anecdote (recited by male lead Doug Jeffrey) neatly sums up his own philosophy, which boils down to "fuck or get in the." In Other Men's Wives, Jeffrey discovers that sometimes having and eating all that cake is too much pastry for any one man to swallow.

After servicing an uncountable number of unhappily married wives in the greater in the county, Jeffrey soon finds him seating his words. So obsessed is he with the spurious advice of his bald-headed butler, that he can't even  see a pistol-whipping coming his way after slipping the short-arm to the wife of a thick-witted bar owner. (Porn fans will recognize in the as the woman he bangs inthe bathroom.) Similarly, a chance encounter with a knockout brunette (Landon Hall) in a plant nursery will end up foretelling his eventual doom, but Jeffrey is too busy nursing the appendix of  his life story to notice.

If this plot is beginning to sound like a Dashiell Hammett thriller, it's no coincidence. Screenwriter Neil Wexler pays tribute to the classic noir tales in spirit, but clearly steers his '48 Packard far from the routine cliches that mark most direct-to-video release. In a moment of bravura inspiration, Jeffrey's father also turns out to be a writer, who is as hard-boiled as his novels ("The Dame Packed a Piece") and a quick dispenser of Catholic guilt.

Despite all this mental baggage, jeffrey makes the mistake of seducing the wife of a vengeful cop (Frank Bronson), who'd just as soon settle for a $20,000 bribe than let the world know that this R.L. Stine of the softcore set is just an overzealous womanizer Rather than follow a predictable trail of blackmail and murder, Wexler and director Philips select to embroil Jeffrey in a game which lin theo his own abduction at the hands of the aforementioned lay inthe flower bed.

Rather than spill the ending we'll simply recommend stocking the tape. The psychology of the tale is engrossing enough to distract the viewer from that fact that much of the on-screen sex is frequent but short-lived. In fact, Other Men's Wives is quite a bit tamer than the usual Toby Phillips (aka Paul Thomas) films, which have been sexier... but rarely smarter.