I feel like a thief to have so much happiness. It must be because we stole someone else's share," says Jennifer Dale early in Your Ticket Is No Longer Valid, sowing the seeds for the dramatic irony she and older lover Richard Harris will reap throughout the film. A plutocrat whose empire has seen better days, Harris leaves his problems behind when in the company of the sexually enthusiastic Dale—at least until the threat of sexual dysfunction begins to creep into their relationship. A doctor's diagnosis of "rusty plumbing" doesn't prove overly helpful, nor does a conversation with George Peppard, a fellow tycoon coming off an affair with a younger journalist. "You know those left-wing bitches. They don't make love, they take notes. And if you're not as hard as a rock, you're the lead article in some pinko magazine," Peppard explains, before elaborating on his unfortunate tendency to achieve only partial erections. (He provides fewer details on which pinko magazines cover the sexual difficulties of the rich.) Harris begins to understand Peppard's problem all too well, but a solution seems to arrive in the unlikely form of knife-wielding Gypsy mugger Winston Rekert, who surprises Harris in his bedroom one night. After surviving the potentially deadly encounter, Harris discovers he can neutralize the threat of partial erections by fantasizing about Rekert having sex with Dale. Harris decides to launch a search for the mugger, a journey that begins with a visit to Parisian madam Jeanne Moreau, once famed for slaying Nazis with a hairpin, and now a well-connected connoisseur of young studs. Before Moreau can offer any results, however, Harris takes Dale on an outing to Paris' shadier quarters, where a less-bewitching man suggests, "I fuck your wife. You like?" Deciding he does not like, Harris leaves the scene, but soon discovers his fantasy Gypsy while on another sex-club outing with Peppard. Simple discovery proves insufficient, and as his seemingly foolproof fantasizing-about-a-man-while-having-sex-with-a-woman plan begins to unravel, Harris again turns to Moreau, this time seeking his own death. On the scheduled night, he discovers that Moreau has instead arranged to fulfill his fantasy of watching Rekert in bed with Dale by enlisting them both in a surprise tableau. Aroused again, Harris takes over for Rekert, but as Moreau prepares to leave the lovemaking couple, she catches a look of disappointment on Harris' face, perhaps in recognition of the logistical difficulties inherent in contacting a third party before every attempt at sex. One quick jab of the hairpin, and his misery ends for good.
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