A Change of Seasons is not one of Shirley MacLaine’s most famous films, and it was not a critical success on release. But it deserves a place in any survey of her work, because it shows her doing something she did better than almost anyone: playing a woman who refuses to be a victim of other people’s behaviour. As Karyn Evans, the wife of a self-important college professor, MacLaine takes a thin, sometimes clumsy comedy-drama about infidelity and gives it a centre of intelligence, humour, and dignity. Critics at the time, even those who disliked the film, singled her out. She was, as one review put it, too good for the material, and that, in itself, is a kind of tribute.
Karyn is married to Adam Evans, played by Anthony Hopkins, a professor of English who is having an affair with one of his students, Lindsey Rutledge, played by Bo Derek. When Karyn discovers the affair, she does not weep in a corner or beg Adam to stay. She retaliates, in kind, by beginning an affair of her own with Pete Lachapelle, a campus carpenter played by Michael Brandon. The film’s premise, that a marriage can be renegotiated through symmetrical infidelity, is deliberately provocative, and the comedy comes from the awkwardness that follows: the two couples, plus Adam and Karyn’s daughter, end up sharing a ski lodge in Vermont, where jealousy, guilt, and farce collide. It is a situation comedy stretched to feature length, and it creaks at times, but MacLaine keeps it alive.
What makes Karyn interesting is that she is not playing a game. She is making a point. Adam has treated their marriage as something he can take for granted while he pursues a younger woman, and Karyn’s affair is her way of saying that she, too, has desires, choices, and a life beyond being a professor’s wife. MacLaine plays Karyn with a wonderful mixture of hurt and mischief. She is angry, but she is also enjoying herself, and she is determined not to be lectured about morality by a man who has just betrayed her. Her scenes with Hopkins are the film’s best, because Hopkins plays Adam as pompous, self-pitying, and genuinely confused, and MacLaine meets that pomposity with a dry, cutting wit. She does not shout. She undercuts, and undercutting is far more effective.
Richard Lang, who took over the direction from Noel Black during production, directs the film as a glossy, mainstream comedy-drama, with attractive New England locations, a ski resort, and a cast of attractive people in attractive clothes. The film looks pleasant, and at times it feels too pleasant for its subject. Infidelity, in real life, is painful and messy, and the film sometimes smooths over that messiness in favour of a joke. But MacLaine’s performance supplies the messiness that the direction lacks. Watch her face when Karyn realises that revenge has not made her happy, only less lonely for a while. Watch her with her daughter, played by Mary Beth Hurt, where her humour drops away and her love and worry show through. Those moments are real, and they give the film a weight it would not otherwise have.
The supporting cast helps. Bo Derek, as Lindsey, plays the student with a wide-eyed sincerity that makes Adam’s infatuation understandable, if not admirable. Michael Brandon, as Pete, is warm and unpretentious, a welcome contrast to Adam’s academic self-importance. And the film’s Vermont setting, all snow, wooden lodges, and winter light, gives the farce a cosy, almost theatrical quality, as if the characters were trapped in a stage comedy from which they cannot escape. The ski lodge becomes a pressure cooker, and MacLaine, as the woman who lit the fuse, is both the cook and the one most likely to get burned.
A Change of Seasons was written by Erich Segal, Fred Segal, and Ronni Kern, and it was clearly intended as a frank, adult comedy about changing sexual mores at the turn of the 1980s. Divorce rates were rising, marriage was being re-examined, and films about open marriages and affairs were briefly fashionable. Seen in that context, Karyn Evans is a figure of her time: a woman in her forties who refuses to accept that her husband’s midlife crisis is more important than her own feelings. She is not a feminist heroine in any programmatic sense. She is a woman who has had enough, and who decides to act on that feeling, with humour and with consequences.
The film’s reception was harsh, and it was nominated for several Golden Raspberry Awards, but history has been kinder to MacLaine’s contribution than contemporary critics were to the film as a whole. She is funny, she is sexy without being coy about it, and she is emotionally credible in a story that often is not. For an actress who had played so many women defined by their relationships with men, Karyn is a useful corrective: she defines herself, even when that self-definition is messy, contradictory, and unfinished. She does not end the film with a neat moral. She ends it having learned something about herself, and about Adam, and MacLaine leaves that learning open-ended, which feels honest.
For Past Tunes readers, A Change of Seasons is worth revisiting not as a lost masterpiece but as a MacLaine showcase. It is a reminder that even in a flawed film, a great actress can find truth, humour, and humanity, and can make a character memorable long after the plot has faded. Karyn Evans may not be as famous as Aurora Greenway or Fran Kubelik, but she belongs in their company: a woman who, faced with betrayal, chooses not to disappear, but to answer back, with wit, with warmth, and with herself intact.