Loving Couples is a 1980 American romantic comedy film written by Martin Donovan and directed by Jack Smight.
The plot offers a comic spin on adultery. When Greg crashes his sports car, doctor Evelyn comes to his rescue, and the two soon are engaged in an affair. Evelyn's workaholic husband learns about it from Greg's live-in girlfriend, scatterbrained television weather girl Stephanie, and the two begin to engage in a dalliance of their own. Complications arise when the two couples plan a clandestine weekend getaway at the same Acapulco resort.
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The scenes in Mexico actually were shot in San Diego, California, and the hotel interiors were filmed at the Ambassador Hotel on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles.
The film grossed $2,806,659 in the US.
Together with A Change of Seasons, the film was one of two 1980 20th Century Fox releases starring Shirley Maclaine that dealt with the subject of marital infidelity.
In her review in the New York Times, Janet Maslin called the film "a flat, lifeless movie . . . about as uneventful and unromantic as a romantic comedy can be" and added, "it never creates the impression that any of the lovers much care about one another, or even that they're people at all." [1]
Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times called it "a dumb remake of a very old idea that has been done so much better so many times before, that this version is wretchedly unnecessary . . . the whole project smells like high-gloss sitcom." [2]
Variety opined, "Direction by Jack Smight is assured and never lags. MacLaine is in top form, sassy and sweet in turn. Coburn delivers a casually effective light comedy performance. Sarandon is topnotch." [3]
Time Out New York says it "subscribes to conventions as old as the hills and twice as rocky, burying any hints of feminist awareness beneath the routines of macho courtship. Faced with direction paced at a lethargic crawl and dialogue of inconceivable banality, the cast respond with performances of glazed charm." [4]
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