Joanne Woodward rumbles with Lindsay Wagner in Passions.

There’s a quiet dignity to the way Joanne Woodward instigates a catfight with Lindsay Wagner at her straying husband’s funeral in Passions (1984). Catherine Kennerly, her patrician homemaker, doesn’t want to engage in fisticuffs, but what else is she to do when Wagner’s Nina Simon, the other woman, has the temerity to attend his church service and dab her eyes in front of God and everyone? Confronting Nina in private, a seething Catherine exclaims “You are filth!” — and still her rival persists, asserting her right to be there.

“I think you’d better leave before you make a fool of yourself,” the younger woman coolly replies. Having silently choked on her anger throughout the priest’s eulogy (“He was that rare individual who really cared about his fellow men, and acted upon his feelings”), Catherine is thrilled to have a living target for her rage. Then Nina drops a bombshell: she was with Richard (Richard Crenna) for eight years, and they have a six-year-old son together. The widow launches herself at the stylish marital interloper almost automatically, propelled as much by grief as fury.

Lindsay Wagner has words with Joanne Woodward in Passions.

They’re separated before anyone lands a slap, but a more bruising battle looms — once she inherits the Malibu love nest where Richard stashed his secret family, Catherine is eager to evict them. His will was never amended to provide for Nina or their son, despite Nina’s assumptions to the contrary, and establishing paternity was more difficult in the early ‘80s than it is today. She files a claim against his estate but lacks any income in the meantime. Lila (Viveca Lindfors), her more experienced neighbor and confidante, refrains from saying “I told you so” and sagely dispenses both practical advice and the occasional Valium.

Here a third woman enters the fray: Beth (Heather Langenkamp), Richard’s 20-year-old daughter. Curious about his hidden life, she visits her half-brother and Nina against Catherine’s wishes and pleads with her mom to drop her scorched-earth campaign against them. “He didn’t just cheat on you,” she reminds her. “He cheated on me, too. He betrayed me, too. I thought I knew him and I didn’t know him at all.” Langenkamp, a Nightmare on Elm Street fan favorite and the funniest of the Lubbock Babes on Just the Ten of Us, gives a strikingly natural performance. She, more than Wagner or Woodward, emotionally anchors Passions.

Viveca Lindfors, Joanne Woodward and Heather Langenkamp in Passions.

Director and cowriter Sandor Stern (Shattered Innocence, The Stranger Beside Me) spends the first third of the film acclimating us to the rhythms of Richard’s dual lives, each so comfortable that his reluctance to give anything up is almost understandable. Crenna, a year away from The Rape of Richard Beck, adroitly walks the line between charming and pathetic; his demanding final scenes must set the stage for small but powerful revelations about his character that aren’t made until late in the film.

Woodward is arresting in moments big and small, from laying bare Catherine’s earliest marital indignities to heatedly twisting her wedding band while fixing her gaze on her husband’s casket. But her storyline never amounts to more than the wife-meets-mistress joke delivered by Estelle Parsons, Woodward’s Rachel, Rachel costar, on a memorable episode of Roseanne: “What a shame we don’t have some sort of flavored coffee to celebrate this moment in our lives.”

And then there’s Wagner (Christmas at the Ranch), whose character and performance are equally inscrutable. Every time it seems as if Nina might have some dawning awareness of why Catherine’s entitled to have a low opinion of her, she turns around and says something insensitive. How we’re supposed to find her likable, sensible or sympathetic as she shamelessly suggests her pregnancy was intentional or mentions it happened not long after Catherine’s hysterectomy, I’m not quite sure. But that seems to be the general idea — as in Mary Tyler Moore’s Just Between Friends, we’re supposed to root for everyone. At least no one in Passions dons a leotard.

Streaming and DVD availability

Passions is available on DVD and currently streams on Tubi and YouTube.

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