La guerre des couples

Tom Selleck stars in Divorce Wars: A Love Story, a tv movie from 1982 also starring Jane Curtin and Mimi Rogers.

Selleck is Jack Sturgess, a highly successful divorce attorney whose own marriage is going belly up.

Not particularly well directed by Donald Wrye with less than sympathetic characters. However, it cashes in on Selleck's tremendous popularity, and he looks great.

Mimi Rogers is a young woman who has an affair with Jack.

Candice Azzara and Charles Haid play a crazed divorcing couple, over the top, for laughs. It makes you wonder how people supposedly once in love could get to such a hateful point, but they do.

This film was Joan Bennett's final appearance, as Curtin's stepmother.

Tom Selleck did a wonderful job of playing the part of Jack, the divorce lawyer. He showed a very emotional side of himself and played the roll very convincingly and with ease. The movie provided insight into how petty situations can become during a divorce. The scene with the fight over a little wooden horse was an awaking of how people react under the pressure of trying to get their fare share of property. Hopefully, Divorce Wars will one day be out on DVD.

Jane Curtain did an excellent job, as well. She and Tom Selleck played off of each other well and were a convincing couple of whom should not have been married.

Tom Selleck as a celebrated divorce attorney (and guest speaker at law school) in Seattle who finds himself on the brink of divorce from unfulfilled wife Jane Curtin. Intentionally over-the-top subplot with an alternate divorcing couple (a buffoonish husband and his vengeful wife)--also Curtin's chattering, bitter-feminist girlfriends--is meant to lighten the load from the battling co-stars, but very little in director and co-writer Donald Wrye's teleplay rings true. ABC-TV drama looks terrific as photographed by Tak Fujimoto, and it has a solid supporting cast including Mimi Rogers (in her debut as a seductive law student who comes to class with her blouse unbuttoned) and Joan Bennett (in her final acting role as Curtin's new stepmother). As for Selleck, keeping his face tense and his brow furrowed, he's not well-directed (and he keeps fiddling with his neckties), but he's not embarrassing. Selleck's light voice (perfect for comedies) and Curtin's high-pitched rattle don't mesh, and when they argue one is mostly aware of the 'literate' dialogue, thick with writer's ink. ** from ****