Susan Lucci seems to specialise in playing cougars. (To avoid confusion I should perhaps point out that I am using that word in its metaphorical sense, not its literal zoological one. La Lucci has a rather limited range as an actress, and impersonating an individual of the species Puma concolor probably does not lie within it). In the last of her films which I saw, "Seduced and Betrayed", she plays a wealthy older woman who seduces a handsome, much younger man. And in "Between Love and Hate", made two years earlier, she also plays a wealthy older woman who seduces a handsome, much younger man.
The main difference between the two films is that in "Seduced and Betrayed" it is the young lover, a married man, who wants to break off the affair, whereupon Lucci's character Victoria turns nasty. In "Between Love and Hate" it is Lucci's character Vivian, a married woman, who breaks off the affair under pressure from her husband, even though he himself has frequently honoured his marriage vows more in the breach than the observance. (The husband is played by Barry Bostwick, like Lucci an actor who seems to turn up in every TV movie). Not that Vivian does not have previous form herself. She makes a habit of seducing, then dumping, a new toyboy every summer. The problem is that on this occasion the young man, a college student named Matt, refuses to take no for an answer.
In "Seduced and Betrayed" I felt that the moral boundaries were too sharply drawn. Victoria was so obviously selfish and manipulative, using her wealth, beauty and influence to snare her victim Dan, that it was impossible to feel any sympathy for her. In "Between Love and Hate" things are, or should be, more nuanced. Although Vivian is just as selfish and manipulative as Victoria, it is she who becomes the victim and Matt the perpetrator of violence. It should, therefore, be possible to sympathise to some extent with both parties, with Matt as a young man driven to extremes by Vivian's thoughtless emotional cruelty and with Vivian as a woman who suffers far more than she deserves as a result of that thoughtlessness.
The trouble is that a storyline like that demands higher standards of acting than those normally found in run-of-the-mill TV movies. Lucci, admittedly, is better here than she was in "Seduced and Betrayed", largely because in that film she had to convey violent emotions which seemed beyond her range. In "Between Love and Hate", Vivian is an entirely shallow character to whom strong emotions of any sort, whether of love or hatred, appear entirely foreign, so Lucci copes much better with the task of playing her. Patrick van Horne as Matt, however, seems so wet and spineless that it is hard to imagine him suddenly transformed by raging passion into a violently unstable individual. Although van Horne was 24 when the film was made, his character is only supposed to be 19 and he comes across as younger still, more like a wet-behind-the-ears schoolboy than a college undergrad. (David Charvet, who played Dan in "Seduced and Betrayed", was 23 at the time but looked rather older).
Like many TV movies, this one is a fictionalised dramatisation of a real-life case. Given the emotions and human drama involved, it should have been possible to have turned the story into an engrossing film. Unfortunately, as with many TV movies, this one appears to have been made by film-makers and actors who imagine that the only skill needed to turn real-life events into a great film is the ability to alter the names, dates and places in an old newspaper cutting. 4/10
