Movies dealing with non-monogamous relationships a filmography by Howard A. Landman

Name, date, director and leading-or-famous actors are given if known. The links take you to Amazon.com to buy the video. You can also try searching in the Internet Movie Database, which often has much more detailed info. (If a movie is not available from Amazon, the link is to the IMDb.)

• "All That Jazz" (1979) Bob Fosse (Roy Sheider, Jessica Lange, Leland Palmer, Ann Reinking, John Lithgow, Ben Vereen, Sandahl Bergman, Wallace Shawn)
  This musical semi-autobiography of drinking, smoking, pill-popping, womanizing choreographer Bob Fosse spends a large fraction of its time dealing with his constant cheating and the effects it has on the people who love him. More cheating than polyam, more polyam than polyfi, but well done and doesn't pull any punches.
• "Anna and the King of Siam" (1946) John Cromwell (Rex Harrison, Irene Dunne)
  Based on the story of Anna Leonowen.
• "Anna and the King" (1999) Andy Tennant (Jody Foster, Chow Yun-fat)
  Based on the story of Anna Leonowen.
• "Another Woman's Lipstick" (Denise Crosby)
  "Red Shoe Diaries 3" - The first episode concerns a woman who has two different lovers, who satisfy different needs. More dishonest monogamy than polyamory.
• Bal Poussiire [Ball im Staub] [Ball in the Dust] (1988) Henri Duparc (Bamba Bakary, Hanny Tchelly, Naky Sy Savanne, Thérèse Taba, Anne Kabou)
  Demi-Dieu (Demigod), a rich farmer and head of the village already has five women. He decides to marry a sixth, young Binta, to have a more diversified week (Sunday is the day of resting). But Binta is a modern woman and self-confident, she doesn't want to be kept in tutelage by Demi-Dieu. She gets in conflict with his husband as well as with the other five women. A pungent comedy on polygamy.
• "Belle Epoque" (1992) Fernando Trueba (Penelope Cruz, Miriam Diaz-Aroca, Ariadna Gil)
  Spanish film set during the Spanish Civil War. An artist takes in a deserter, who repays him by sleeping with all four of his daughters. It's pretty light hearted and a warm farcical romp, but ends with a monogamous marriage.
• "Big Top Pee-wee" (1988) Randal Kleiser (Pee-wee Herman, Kris Kristofferson, Valeria Golino)
  A subplot has Pee-wee's former fiancee Winnie taking up with the 3 or 4 Piccolapupula brothers. Boy, does she look happy!
• "Becoming Colette" (1992) Danny Huston (Klaus Maria Brandauer, Mathilda May, Virginia Madsen)
  Young Collette attempts to deal with the coldness of her husband by entering into a menage a trois with him and his mistress.
• "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice" (1969) Paul Mazursky (Robert Culp, Natalie Wood, Elliot Gould, Dyan Cannon)
  More a wife-swapping tale than any model for a healthy poly relationship. Still, widely known, and helped raise poly questions in many people's minds when it first came out.
• "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" (1969) George Roy Hill (Paul Newman, Robert Redford, Katharine Ross)
  "Has a very active poly flavor to it. While it was never stated as such, both men seemed to have a very active relationship with the woman." - Gene Wolf
• "Cabaret" (1972) Bob Fosse (Liza Minelli, Joel Grey, Michael York, Marisa Berenson)
  A not-very-honest triad is part of the plot ... not to mention Sally's relationship with MC.
• "Cafe au Lait"
  French film about a woman who becomes pregnant by one of her lovers. The three of them wind up forming a family of sorts to raise the child.
• "Carrington" (1995) Christopher Hampton (Emma Thompson, Jonathan Pryce [best actor, Cannes])
  "The true story of a bunch of writers and artists in England in the 20's, 'The Bloomsbury group', of which perhaps Virginia Woolf is the most well-known outside literary circles but she does not appear in the film. Jonathan Pryce plays a gay man; Emma Thompson is straight but in love with him; eventually she marries another, bisexual man and the three of them live together for some time. Problems occur when (1) Thompson's first fiancee has difficulties giving her up; (2) Thompson has a secret affair with the bisexual man's closest friend; (3) the bisexual man openly introduces another woman into the arrangement, which Thompson doesn't mind but Pryce does; (4) Pryce falls ill." - (anonymous)
• "A Change of Seasons" (1980) Richard Lang (Shirley Maclaine, Anthony Hopkins, Bo Derek, Mary Beth Hurt)
  A surprisingly good performance from Bo Derek, and a superb one from Shirley Maclaine, help elevate this movie above the norm. Maclaine's professor husband (Hopkins) has an affair with Derek; she then has an affair of her own, and the four decide to go on a holiday together to see whether they can work something out ...
• "Cherry, Harry and Raquel" a.k.a. "Three Ways to Love" (1969) Russ Meyer (Uschi Digart, Charles Napier)
  Soft-core porn from Russ Meyer.
• "Design For Living" (1933) Ernst Lubitsch (Gary Cooper, Fredric March, Miriam Hopkins, Edward Everett Horton)
  Adapted from Noel Coward's stage comedy by Ben Hecht. Artist Cooper and playwright March are best friends in Paris. They both fall in love with Hopkins.
• "Enemies: A Love Story" (1989) Paul Mazursky (Anjelica Huston, Lena Olin)
  From a story by Isaac Bashevis Singer. A man with three female partners gets very different things from each relationship.
  "An interesting depiction of what I call 'squeaky wheel poly', where the person who yells the loudest about zir problems is the one who gets most of the attention" - Stef Jones
• "Farinelli The Castrato" (1994)
  "The story of the 18th century opera star, said to have been the most famous of the castrati. There are a number of scenes portraying Farinelli and his brother sharing a woman. Spectacular costumes, music is divine, and how often do MFM triads make it to the big screen?" - Mark Schneider
• "The Fox" (1968) Mark Rydell (Sandy Dennis, Keir Dullea)
  From the book by D.H. Lawrence. Two women lovers running a farm have their relationship threatened by the arrival of a man.
• "French Twist" ["Gazon Maudit"] (1995) Josiane Balasko (Victoria Abril, Josiane Balasko, Alain Chabat)
  About a woman who ends up with a husband and a wife. Very funny, with lots of realistic irrationality as they work through all the issues. There is a review at the Out magazine web site which includes the following quote: "Everybody dreams of having this, your house, your husband, your children, and your wife," Abril says with an impish laugh. "You would have no guilt, no clandestinity, no lies. What more could you ask for?" How about a sequel?
  "A neglected wife, Loli (Abril), gets back at her cheating husband, Laurent (Chabat), by starting an affair with a lesbian, Marijo (Balasko--also the writer and director) that blossoms into a serious relationship and competition between Laurent and Marijo. It's chock-full of drama that's sometimes over the top or excessively maudlin (or some would say typically French), but the characters are for the most part multi-dimensional, and the movie depicts the explosive and confusing beginning of a poly relationship with surprising realism." - Stef Jones
• "Group Marriage" (1972) Stephanie Rothman (Aimee Eccles, Claudia Jennings, Jayne Kennedy, Jeff Pomerantz, Zack Taylor, Victoria Vetri)
• "The Harrad Experiment" (1973) Ted Post (Don Johnson, Tippi Hedren, James Whitmore, Melanie Griffith, Victoria Thompson, Laurie Walters)
  A not-too-awful adaptation of the Rimmer novel (which is better). Unfortunately, it spends so much time on the topic of public nudity that it has little left over to deal with poly issues. NOTE: Do not buy the made-in-Canada "Platinum" DVD of this movie. It is one of the worst-quality transfers I have ever seen, and appears to be an edited-for-television version with all the nude scenes deleted.
• "Harrad Summer" (1974) Steven Hilliard Stern (Marty Allen, Bill Dana, Richard Doran, Victoria Thompson, Laurie Walters)
  Unreviewed - has anyone seen this?
• "Heart Beat" (1980) John Bynum (Nick Nolte, Sissy Spacek)
  This is the story of "beat" reporter Jack Kerouac's affair with a married couple, Neal & Carolyn Cassady.
• "Heartburn" (1986) Mike Nichols (Stockard Channing, Jeff Daniels, Milos Forman, Jack Nicholson, Yakov Smirnoff, Meryl Streep)
  Unreviewed - has anyone seen this?
• "Henry And June" (1990) Philip Kaufman (Fred Ward, Uma Thurman, Maria De Medeiros, Richard E. Grant)
  Writer Henry Miller has an affair with his friend Anais Nin, and then his wife June shows up. Anais finds herself becoming attracted to June ...
• "Honeymoon for Three" (1915) Maurice Elvey (Elisabeth Risdon)
  Unreviewed - has anyone seen this?
• "Honeymoon for Three" (1941) Lloyd Bacon (Lee Patrick, Ann Sheridan, Jane Wyman)
  Unreviewed - has anyone seen this?
• "The Hunger" (1983) Tony Scott (Susan Sarandon, David Bowie, Catherine Deneuve)
  More bi than poly, and only a few moments of that (between Deneuve and Sarandon, and then at the very end Sarandon appears to have new partners of both genders).
  "What do you need to know? If David Bowie's in it, it's weird, and if Susan Sarandon's in it, she takes off her shirt." - Doug Brown
• "Jules and Jim" (1961) Francois Truffaut (Jeanne Moreau, Oskar Werner)
  Two men fall in love with the same woman.
• "The King and I" (1956) Walter Lang (Yul Brynner, Deborah Kerr)
  Musical, based on the story of Anna Leonowen.
• "Ladakh: In Harmony with the Spirit" (1987)
  Includes an examination of how polyandry helps keep the population stable. See also here.
• "A Lesson In Love" (1954) Ingmar Bergman (Gunnar Bjornstrand)
  One character says "I'll keep you both if I have to share your bed." Sadly, the response is "You're mad!" A romantic comedy about a doctor trying to win back his wife after she leaves him over an affair of his.
• "Lianna" (1983) John Sayles (Linda Griffiths)
  A professor's wife finds out he's having an affair, and at the same time falls in love with a female professor. More a lesbian tale than a poly one, but especially good at showing the effects on family and friends of "coming out" different.
• "Lovin' Molly" (1974) Sidney Lumet (Beau Bridges, Blythe Danner, Anthony Perkins, Susan Sarandon)
  Follows the lives of three men and the one woman they share from the time they are children until they are seniors. One man, who you never see, is the legal husband (and her first lover), the other two are best friends and her alternate lovers. Based on "Leaving Cheyenne" by Larry McMurtry.
• "Loving Couples" (1980) Jack Smight (Shirley MacLaine, James Coburn, Susan Sarandon, Sally Kellerman, John De Lancie)
  Spouse-swapping.
• "Lucky Lady" (1975) Stanley Donen (Liza Minelli, Gene Hackman, Burt Reynolds)
  A pretty bad movie, but it does look as if the three main characters are getting set to stay together at the end.
• "The Mahabharata" (1989) Peter Brook
  Contains the marriage of five brothers, the Pandava, to a single wife, Draupadi.
• "Me and the Colonel" (1958) Peter Glenville (Danny Kaye, Kurt Juergens, Liliane Montevecchi)
  A Polish Jew and a Polish aristocrat/officer flee the Nazis, together with the officer's mistress, who begins to appreciate the Jew's talents. Very funny and ends on a hopeful note. "There are always two possibilities."
• "Melody for Three" (1941) Eric C. Kenton (Fay Wray)
  Unreviewed - has anyone seen this?
• "Micki + Maude" (1984) Blake Edwards
  (Amy Irving, Dudley Moore, Ann Reinking, Wallace Shawn, Andre the Giant)
  A man who wants a child badly ends up getting both wife and girlfriend pregnant.
• "No Way Out" (1987) Roger Donaldson (Kevin Costner, Sean Young, Gene Hackman)
  Costner gets involved with Young, who is already involved with his boss (Hackman). Bad things happen. She actively says that she is poly (before she is killed).
• "Paint Your Wagon" (1969) Joshua Logan (Lee Marvin, Clint Eastwood, Jean Seberg, Ray Walston)
  "This is among the most nauseating of Hollywood musicals, at least to those of us who are generally nauseated by Hollywood musicals. Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood live in a triple relationship with Jean Seberg. The woman is sold off to the highest bidder (Marvin) by her Mormon husband, then makes up her mind that she is in love with both Marvin and Eastwood. Since her former husband had two wives, she reasons, why can't she have two husbands? There is absolutely no hint of sexual involvement between the two men." - James Quinn
• "Paradise for Three" (1938) Edward Buzzell (Mary Astor, Frank Morgan)
  Unreviewed - has anyone seen this?
• "Raise the Red Lantern" (1991) Yi-Mou Zhang (Li Gong)
  A college student becomes the 4th wife of a wealthy middle-aged man.
  "Poly topics figure greatly in this drama, mostly competition between the four wives of one rich man in China in the 1920's. It does not paint poly in a happy light, because the women do not get along at all and their husband does nothing to ease the tensions, but it raises a lot of questions about competition and the role of women in Chinese society of that era." - Suzanne Saunder
• "Rita, Sue and Bob too" (1986) Alan Clarke (Siobhan Finneran, Michelle Holmes, George Costigan)
  A married man's affair with two younger women causes his wife to leave him. Can the three lovers transmute their sexual interest into something more lasting?
• "Same Time, Next Year" (1978) Robert Mulligan (Alan Alda, Ellen Burstyn)
  Alda has a once a year meeting with his lover (as opposed to his wife), most of the time is spent examining the changes in the two people in the intervening times.
• "Sharing Richard"
  A lawyer, a real estate agent, and an office worker, who are best friends, separately meet and start dating a recently divorced doctor. Instead of breaking it off, they decide to share him without his knowledge.
• "She's Gotta Have It" (1986) Spike Lee
  A story of a woman with 3 boyfriends who each are trying to get her to give up the other boyfriends.
• "Sleep With Me" (Meg Tilly,Eric Stoltz)
  Disappointing, disjointed, and amoral. Just as a couple are about to be married, their best friend decides he's in love with her.
• "Small Circle of Friends" (1980) Rob Cohen (Brad Davis)
• "Splendor" (1999) Greg Araki (Johnathon Schaech, Matt Keeslar, Kathleen Robertson)
  "an excellent movie. It is about a MFM triad, and covers the beginning of the poly relationship, and they have to decide, when the female becomes pregnant, how to keep the family together. The two males have to work together to show how much they really need the female and how much they love her. ... a good ending" - Kristen
• "Summer Lovers" (1982) Randal Kleiser (Daryl Hannah, Peter Gallagher, Valerie Quennessen)
  A young American couple on a summer vacation in the Mediterranean get involved with a French archaeologist.
  "Seemed to deal with the whole 'triad' issue well." - Jack VanBreen
• "Three" (1969)
  Unreviewed - has anyone seen this?
• "Three for Bedroom C" (1952) Milton Bren (Hans Conreid, Margaret Dumont, Gloria Swanson)
  Unreviewed - has anyone seen this?
• "Three Husbands" (1950) Irving Reis (Eve Arden, Howard Da Silva)
  Unreviewed - has anyone seen this?
• "Three in the Attic" (1968) Richard Wilson (Christopher Jones, Nan Martin, Yvette Mimieux, Judy Pace, Reva Rose)
  The several lovers of a man discover each other and decide to punish him by locking him in an attic and forcing him to have sex with them hourly.
• "Three is a Family" (1944) Edward Ludwig
  Unreviewed - has anyone seen this?
• "Three Of Hearts" (1993) Yurek Bogayevicz
  A lesbian nurse (Lynch) hires a male escort (Baldwin) to seduce her bi female ex-lover (Fenn) and break her heart so that she'll come back. Needless to say, things don't work out quite that simply.
  "A disapointment for me, it could have ended with the three trying to work something out instead of all mess." - Kevin
• "Three Who Loved" (1931) George Archainbaud
  Unreviewed - has anyone seen this?
• "Threesome" (1994) Andrew Fleming (Lara Flynn Boyle, Stephen Baldwin, Josh Charles)
  An error puts two men and one woman in the same college dorm room. The movie starts off on the wrong foot by labelling the relationship "deviant" and "abnormal" in the first 30 second, and goes downhill from there. The three lie, hide important facts from each other, throw garbage out windows, steal lawn ornaments, and are generally thoroughly unappetizing. The few brief poly sex scenes are almost the only good thing about this movie; at least they shut up then. Even the plot is mostly a cheap ripoff of Sartre's No Exit.
  "I found it irritatingly shallow. It seemed like the writers had gone out of their way to create a situation where the relationship was least likely to work. The relationships between the three people were so imbalanced that any two of them could hardly stand to be in the same room together. None of the characters seemed to be at all articulate or thoughtful, so there was absolutely no dialogue about whether or how threesome relationships in general could work." - Louise Mallory
  "Granted the movie had some flaws, but on the whole I felt it broached the subject well. I mean they could have just made an all around sex thing out of it with no dialog concerning life outside the sex." - Kevin
  "The gay male character never said that he was bi or het, yet the only sexual contact he had (except for a hand on the straight male's hip in the last lovemaking scene) was with the female. Created a highly imbalanced relationship. Did you notice that during the final sex scene, the gay man was at one point obviously excluded? He was there, but he didn't seem to actually be having sex with anybody. Weird." - Michael Phillips
• "Two English Girls" a.k.a. "Les Deux Anglaises et le Continent" (1971) Francois Truffaut (Jean-Pierre Leaud)
  Two women fall in love with the same man.
• "The Unbearable Lightness Of Being" (1988) Philip Kaufman (Lena Olin, Daniel Day-Lewis, Juliette Binoche)
  The womanizing Tomas falls in love with monogamous Tereza, but only his lover Sabina truly understands him. Meanwhile, Russian tanks roll into Prague. Highly recommended.
• "Willie and Phil" (1980) Paul Mazursky (Michael Ontkean, Ray Sharkey, Margot Kidder, Natalie Wood)
  About a trio polyamorous relationship.
• "Women In Love" (1970) Ken Russell (Glenda Jackson, Alan Bates, Jennie Linden, Oliver Reed, Eleanor Bron) From the D.H. Lawrence novel. A wealthy industrialist, a school inspector, a socialite, and her sister, all have different views of what relationships mean. If you like this, you might also like "The Rainbow", from another Lawrence novel about the earlier life of some of the same characters. (Cameo by an older Glenda Jackson, playing the mother of the character she played in Women In Love!)

Television

• "Anna and the King" (1972) (Samantha Eggar, Keye Luke)
  Based on the story of Anna Leonowen.
• "The Avenging Angel" (1995/1/20) Tom Berenger (Charlton Heston, James Coburn, Tom Berenger)
  TNT cable movie starring Berenger as a crack-shot bodyguard for Mormon prophet Brigham Young (Heston). "You know, Alpheus," Berenger snarls, "the problem with polygamy is that when you have 27 wives, and 56 children, one of them is just bound to turn out as dirt stupid and pig ugly as you."
• "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice" (1973) (Anne Archer, Jodie Foster)
  
• "I Had Three Wives" (1985) (Shanna Reed, Teri Copley, David Faustino, Victor Garber)
  Not poly, just a bigamy story. "... about a husband who cheated on his wife in one state with another woman whom he married in another state. Then he met and fell in love with another woman in another state and married her." - Kristen
• "Portrait Of A Marriage" (1990) Stephen Whittaker (Janet McTeer, Cathryn Harrison, David Haigh) 4 x 0:50
  A lavish BBC production about the relationships of Vita Sackville-West.
• "Red Shoe Diaries" (1992) Zalman King
  Man finds out about girlfriend's poly lifestyle after she kills herself. Then he meets her other lover. [This must just be one episode ... RSD is a series.]
• "Sanctuary" (1993/11/27), a season two episode of Star Trek: Deep Space 9
  This episode concerns first contact with a matriarchal species, which in one brief scene is established to be polyandrous and perfectly accepting of group sleeping arrangements.
• "The Substitute Wife" (1994) Peter Werner (Farrah Fawcett, Lea Thompson, Peter Weller, Karis Bryant)
  Thompsons character is dying, and she finds Fawcett to be a new wife for her husband. The family falls in love with the new woman and then Thompson miraculously recovers. They decide to keep the family together with both women. "Has many poly positive scenes in it even though the man is a superficial jerk several times" - Tom Walters
• "Threesome" (1984) Lou Antonio (Deborah Raffin, Stephen Collins, Dana Delany, Joel Higgins)