Television Reviews : The Full-Court Press of a Man of Affairs

A cad who strings along a number of women, exploiting them for monetary as well as sexual favors while pretending that each is his one and only, is the sort of subject who’s irresistible to TV-movie makers. You can almost hear the network executives thinking: Men will be amused by the guy’s audacity, while women will be gratified by his inevitable comeuppance.

But the subject brings with him an inherent problem that hasn’t been resolved in “Addicted to His Love” (tonight at 9 p.m., Channels 7, 3, 10 and 42). In order to show him sweeping several women off their feet simultaneously, within the time limit imposed by the TV-movie format, each affair has to be condensed into a few scenes. Yet when you don’t see the extent of this man’s full-court press, it’s hard to believe that any woman could fall for his palaver.

At the beginning of the movie, we see Linda Purl meeting Barry Bostwick; within minutes of screen time, she’s feeding him funds and planning to marry him. The other women (Dee Wallace Stone and Erin Gray), who are supposed to be more sophisticated, look just as stupidly gullible.

Yet when they finally catch on and band together, they suddenly become as shrewd as their seducer. Writers Ronni Simon and Richard Alfieri devised an awfully unlikely trap with which these women snare their prey.

Perhaps the writers should have concentrated on one romance. The one woman wouldn’t seem so idiotic, and the others would be there for shock value later in the movie (as a character played by Polly Bergen is now).

The performances are just about as shallow as the script. Arthur Allan Seidelman directed.