By Richard Winters
My Rating: 1 out of 10
4-Word Review: Her husband is gay.
Claire (Kate Jackson) thinks she has the perfect marriage yet her husband Zach (Michael Ontkean) harbors dormant feelings for other men and one day he decides to act upon them when he meets Bart (Harry Hamlin). Bart is more into one night flings, which heightens Zach’s inner turmoil as he’s not sure if he should stay with Claire, or live life the way he wants.
This film was considered groundbreaking for its time and even controversial, but it has not stood the test of time well and comes off as quite benign by today’s standards. Part of the problem is with Zach who has supposedly harbored these dormant feelings for a long time, but it is not clear why he suddenly decides to act upon them. The shift between happy married couple to an unhappy one seems to occur overnight and is jarring.
He asks Bart out for lunch when he has only known him for a few minutes, but if he’s quarreling with desires that he has never acted upon then I would think he’d be more hesitant and only move forward with Bart after having known him longer. He also denies to Bart that he’s gay and then a half-minute later is kissing him on the lips. Then quickly after that he’s hopping into bed with him, but I would presume someone who has never had sex with another man before would react more awkwardly and self-consciously their first time.
Hamlin’s character is far more interesting simply because he’s edgier than Zach who is too annoyingly goody-goody. I also enjoyed that he watches movies on a laser disc machine, which you rarely see anymore, but he like all the other gay men in the film has too much of a pretty-boy face and the film should’ve balanced itself by showing that balding, overweight, middle-aged men can be gay too.
The segments where the characters talk directly to the screen is unnecessary and amounts to incessant babbling as they describe things that the viewer could easily pick-up on visually. Wendy Hiller’s old lady character adds nothing and the scene where Zach goes home to visit his folks (Arthur Hill, Nancy Olson) is equally pointless and should’ve also been excised as the film’s runtime is too long to begin with.
Gay viewers may take to this better and the film’s intent may have been noble, but that doesn’t forgive its poor execution as the whole thing comes off like a shallow soap opera with cardboard characters manufactured to fit into an already preconceived concept. In fact the movie’s only good moment comes during a throwaway bit involving Erica Hiller, who was the daughter of the film’s director Arthur Hiller, playing an overly deluded, but woefully under talented singer who is convinced that she will be a smash with the audience during an amateur contest only to be booed off stage the moment she starts singing, which acts as an interesting precursor to a bad audition from ‘American Idol’.
My Rating: 1 out of 10
Released: February 12, 1982
Runtime: 1 Hour 51 Minutes
Rated R
Director: Arthur Hiller
Studio: 20th Century Fox
Available: DVD
Scopophilia 
I think you’re being unfair to the film. It’s not good but not so much because of the script but because of the sense of hesitation that Arthur Hiller and the actors brought to the project. It all seems so “worthy” and sober whereas with perhaps a younger ( and dare I say it -gay) director the film might have had more life. I mean one star? You give cheapo slasher movies made in warehouses on shoetring budgets better than that. At least this was a major studio attempting to step up to the plate with a gay themed melodrama in which the gay characters were not psychopaths or suicidal.