Loving

Director: Irvin Kershner
Year Released: 1970
Rating: 2.0

By-the-numbers morality material: boozy, Pratt-trained illustrator (George Segal), married and with children, spends a good deal of his day trying to win a special account from a rugged industrialist (Sterling Hayden) and manage his extramarital affairs. As it turns out ... infidelity can ruin a marriage (who'd have thought?). Segal's character is a miserable dope and hard to empathize with, though I'll admit I got a good chuckle out of the party scene that concludes the movie in which a not-so-smart Segal gets physical with a friend's wife (in a child's play room) and the incident gets captured on closed-circuit television, in which the partygoers (and Segal's wife, Eva Marie Saint) can see him sans pants. Ang Lee did this thing a tiny bit better in a little movie called The Ice Storm.