TV Reviews : ‘Love and Betrayal’ a Movie for Women

A husband dumps his wife for lust. The wife, too dependent to counterattack, struggles through denial and dismay to discover that life can begin at 40 if one has the guts to throw out the cad when he returns home like a puppy.

“Love and Betrayal” is not a new idea. It’s not even a hankie movie. But it’s certainly a woman’s movie (at 9 p.m. Sunday on Channels 2 and 8).

Legions of middle-aged women shaken by broken marriages and the shock of shopping their skills for the first time with nothing more than a degree in English from Tufts will identify with Stephanie Powers’ portrait of abject humiliation, loss of self-respect and ultimate endurance.

As the husband and hot author of a how-to book (“Relax to Win”) who leaves the hearth for a blonde in the book promotion department, David Birney plays a callow role that is thankless. “You won’t be 25 again, no matter who you sleep with,” Powers yells at him.

Actually, writer Laurian Legett and director Richard Michaels nail the wife, too. Powers’ character is too stupid to see anything coming, she has never given passion a serious thought and, finally, her complacent, rosy, “Stepford Wives” homemaker would bore any husband.

The trouble in the credibility department is that Powers is better looking, even when she looks haggard, than the younger woman cavorting with her husband. It’s ridiculous when Powers seeks help from a plastic surgeon for her elegant cheekbones.

The wife’s turmoil unfolds in a house that is in the chaos of reconstruction--an imaginative metaphor by writer Legett for the remodeling of the wife’s own life.