How others will see it. This film has as many characters as a soap opera, a fitting analogy since there's a lot of relationships going around, most of which are floundering. Good acting and the infrequent line that works may inspire the infrequent laugh, but it will fall into the nervous chuckle category, rather than the belly-shaker of an old W.C. Fields vehicle.
How I felt about it. Lovers and Other Strangers is notable as the motion picture debut of Diane Keaton, who plays the unhappy wife of the brother of the groom. Keaton's complaints about her marriage come down to his not buying her a book on Spain for her birthday, and his hair doesn't smell the way it used to.
If these complaints seem unimportant, that's the point made by future Maude/Golden Girl Bea Arthur and her blue-collar husband, Richard S. Castellano. Their opinion is that marriage is a sentence to be passed on good terms through thoughtfulness. In other works, don't divorce. Deal with it. Regardless.
If Arthur's marriage is stale, it is at least stable. Wilma (Anne Meara) is a sex-starved woman unable to talk her disinterested husband Johnny (Harry Guardino) into doing the nasty. Bedelia's cagey father Gig Young is cheating on clueless Cloris Leachman with ugly scene-maker Anne Jackson.
The younger hip generation is represented by Brenda (Marian Hailey), a bookworm and pop philospher who isn't quite sure what she wants, unlike classic wolf Jerry (Bob Dishy), whose obsessive goal is to "score."
This mix of relationships is churned like a stew with only a single resolution: Bedelia and Brandon are now wed. Well, two outcomes, since The Carpenters had a huge hit single with the film's breakout romantic song, "For All We Know."
Nothing else is really settled, true to life. Brandon is a jerk with an occasional streak of humor, oblivious to the quality of Bedelia. Brenda and Jerry are incompatible, and Diane Keaton will leave her personality-impaired hubby for Woody Allen, who looks like a schmuck but has a sense of humor, and can write good screenplays too.