Yikes! I just watched one of the worst vintage movie ever,
"Butterfield 8" staring Elizabeth Taylor and Lawrence Harvey. What a waste of a good actor in Harvey. The script was full of cliches and bad dialogue. Elizabeth didn't even try to do a good acting job portraying the party girl character, Gloria, and yet she won an Academy Award for it. The adulterous Harvey's character was also a drunk and abusive, yet Gloria falls in love with him. Maybe tramps can't be choosers in the scriptwriters' eyes.
He treats his wife like a doormat, but she thinks being a good wife is putting up with him going out at all hours, coming home drunk and abusive among other things, but she wants to work things out cuz she luvs him. Yeah, that's how real women would think of those goings on. 
Honestly, no woman, even back then in real life would love this guy, no matter how low her self-esteem was. He's a real loser. The only reason he has anything going for him at all is because he married a rich girl and has a job with one her family owned corporations.
He supposedly falls in love with Gloria because she's really a good girl underneath all that slut stuff. There is an unintentional comedic moment when all of Gloria's past lovers surround him in a bar and tell him that they rent a baseball stadium every year for a reunion of her boyfriends. Boy does he get pissed. I guess promiscuity is fine for the goose, but not the gander. The worst part was all the moralizing, but it was all directed to the bad girl Gloria. Not a word of rebuke was pointed to the drinking, womanizing, abusive and bellicose Harvey's character. Instead he is treated sympathetically because he's going through some angst.
Of course at the end Gloria regrets her ways and tries to leave town for a fresh start. Harvey chases her and she kills herself in an accident. Of course she had to die cuz she was tainted after all. On the other hand, Harvey returns to his Fifth Avenue Apartment. Wifey hasn't changed the locks. He tells her he has to go away and think for awhile and when he sorts things out he'll come back and if she still wants him they can work things out. Honestly, she didn't even throw the Ming vase at him but looked at him with adoring eyes. Dina Merill, who played the wife should have gotten the Academy Award for getting through her lines without gagging.
However, I do believe the film does reflect the sexist attitudes of the times and also the fact that the only the message that got out was loaded with testosterone because at the time the movie industry was controlled by powerful men who held the key positions of producers and directors and could shape the opinion as men saw it and women just didn't have any control over the content.
My rating of this film: 