The Man Who Loved Women is truly woeful, reeking of production-line, big star filmmaking and nothing else.
Once again, Burt Reynolds appears as the irresistible, yet sensitive, modern man in search of something fulfilling in his life. This time, Reynolds’ angst is examined in flashback from his funeral in the words of his psychiatrist (Julie Andrews). And they are terrible words, to be sure. From the start, the psychobabble she spouts is so stilted and stupid that it raises false hopes that Women must surely be a satire, and perhaps a promising one.
Had not director Blake Edwards been fooling around with an ‘American extension’ of Francois Truffaut’s 1977 film of the same title, there probably was a better picture contained here in Reynolds’ one really amusing sojourn into a bemused, adulterous affair with Kim Basinger.
She’s great as Houston millionaire Barry Corbin’s kinky wife, given to stopwatch dalliances in dangerous places.