Making Love

‘A movie of its time’!

Director – Arthur Hiller

Writers – Barry Sandler(screenplay)

               A. Scott Berg(story)

Main actors of a large cast

• • Michael Ontkean as Zack
  • Kate Jackson as Claire
  • Harry Hamlin as Bart
    

Making Love came as rather a surprise to us; far from being sheer Hollywood treacle, it was in fact a quite strong story.  Mind you, the direction and the editing and also the camerawork would have been better expended on a commercial for (soft) soap.

Everybody appears to live beyond their means, or are vastly overpaid, especially ‘Bart’, who is supposed to be a novelist who hasn’t hit the jackpot – yet.  Bart becomes involved with Zack, a doctor, whom we have seen in earlier scenes “looking at men”, and, in one, trying to pick someone up in a cruising area.

Zack is married and has been for eight years, and he and his wife enter a new phase in their lives quite early on in the action, when they move into a new/old house which they keep on saying they can’t afford – she also becomes something unspecified but important in a T.V. company, and Bart meets Zack.  They end up in bed together and Zack wants to pretend that he is only experimenting.  Bart savagely exposes this fraud and then tells Zack that if he has fallen in love then he has chosen the wrong man, as he, Bart, has no intention of settling down to a life of connubial bliss.

This skirmish is the result of Zack telling Claire, his wife, and her violent reaction to it.  (Rather over-violent – people tend (so we are told) to cry on these occasions, not thump their partners).

There is a very awkward jump in the film here, and we are expected to take the passage of a considerable amount of time for granted.  Claire goes in search of Zack and discovers that he has become hot-stuff on the meat-market.  This episode does, however, give the scriptwriter the entrée for a very positive little speech from a gay man, where he says that he is at least as happy as anyone else.

Claire and Zack meet each other at the funeral of a mutual friend and live happily ever after, it is assumed.  The only problem here is that Zack is shown as being what we can only describe as sem-wedded to a by no means appetising man in New York, New York.

Links:

• YouTube: Making Love (1982)
• YouTube – BARRY SANDLER 1982 Rare Unaired INTERVIEW Making Love
• YouTube – HARRY HAMLIN 1982 Rare Unaired INTERVIEW Making Love
• IMDB – Making Love
• Eating Out