L'amour a plusieurs visages

This unintentionally hilarious 1965 sudser stars Lana Turner as Kit, a wealthy woman trying to hold onto her purchased husband Pete (Cliff Robertson) when one of her ex-beaus is found dead on the beach, a probable suicide. His girlfriend (Stefanie Powers) arrives to find out what went on, and she and Pete fall for one another, to the dismay of Kit, who spends a lot of time drinking, changing clothes and throwing parties. Watching the situation unfold and hoping to get in once Pete is out is a gigolo (Hugh O'Brian) who is currently romancing a tourist of a certain age (Ruth Roman) while his partner romances her friend (Virginia Grey).

At 45 or thereabouts, Lana Turner is deeply tanned, expensively wardrobed and beautiful, though a bit hard-looking. It's sad to remember her in films like "These Glamor Girls" and "Slightly Dangerous" where she was so fresh, energetic and lovely. It's more than age - it's drink, it's cigarettes, it's bad men and it's the Stompanato scandal.

The story starts out one way - the dead man on the beach and an investigation into his death, and then keeps changing, first to a volatile marriage, then to adultery and finally bullfighting, which is used as an allegory for what goes on between a man and a woman. Another fifteen more minutes of film, who knows where we would have ended up.

However many faces love has, this film doesn't move through them very quickly. It doesn't have the pizazz to be the campy film "Portrait in Black" is. As over the top as the story is, the acting isn't over the top enough. See it once for Lana's wardrobe, how unbelievably young Stefanie Powers is and Hugh O'Brian in swimming trunks, and then forget it. You'll be able to.

Released the same year as "The Sound of Music", you won't see any nuns or singing children trotting through this film! The action is on a far seedier level. Ms. Turner (enjoying a career renaissance after the stabbing death of her gangster lover and the wild success of "Imitation of Life") plays a bored, despondent socialite who passes her long afternoons in the Acapulco sun with local gigilos while her husband (a former gigilo) turns the other cheek. Things get ugly when one of Turner's playthings washes up onshore---dead. His former girlfriend (Powers) comes to claim his body and attracts the attention of Turner's husband. Meanwhile, O'Brian (yet another aging gigilo!) is bedding rich vacationer Roman and trying to get Turner's attention as well. It all culminates in an overheated, eventually hilarious climax involving a bull! The chief assets of the film are Lana's clothes (the Edith Head concoctions cost a then-staggering---even now-staggering $1,000,000!) and the ultra-macho, hairy-chested, leathery-tanned, sexually insatiable, skimpy swimsuit-wearing O'Brian! Lana's outfits will please any fan of glitzy, over-the-top, drag-queeny get-ups (The swimsuits with matching cover ups alone could make Ru-Paul drool). Hugh is a revelation. He trots around in teensy, clingy trunks, sporting a lean, hirsute figure and displays virility in the form of surfing and beach fitness. Once seen, ol' Wyatt Earp can never be thought of the same way again. HOT!

It begins with the discovery of a body washed up on a beach -- a classic start to a mystery story -- but there proves to be little interest in the fate of that particular body. Murder? Accident? Suicide? The movie never delivers a satisfying answer because the body on the beach turns out to be simply a flashy introduction to the story of a troubled marriage among the idle rich. Even this aspect of the story isn't well handled because the movie doesn't seem to realize that Cliff Robertson is or at least should be the main character. He's the ex-beach boy who's now married to the wealthy Lana Turner but whose sense of decency causes him to feel guilty about living in her world of privilege. Perhaps not surprisingly, he finds himself drawn to the youthful innocence of Stefanie Powers, the girlfriend of the body-on-the-beach who's come to Acapulco to investigate the situation.

However, though Robertson is the character in the compelling position, the character who undergoes the greatest degree of growth and change, the movie understandably keeps turning its attention to Lana Turner. After all, she's the top-billed star and it's with her name that the movie hopes to attract its core audience of Sunday-matinée women. Turner certainly looks good, all things considered, and she's dressed and jeweled with all the requisite glamour, but her character never comes to life and the attempt to give her depth and sympathy through the revelation of a "shocking secret" from her past simply doesn't work. The revelation seems too pat, too contrived, and the fact that it's delivered through a monologue Turner implausibly shares with her maid doesn't help matters.

Interest starts to ebb away in the second half and an effort to re- charge the movie with a bullfight sequence seems more silly than exciting. Still, there's enough of a "glow" to this old-fashioned star vehicle to qualify it as one of those "guilty pleasures" whose charms can't adequately be explained to the uninitiated.

Cliff Robertson does what he can with the material but seems glum and uncomfortable and one never really accepts that he loves Lana Turner. For her part, Turner strikes the right poses but fails to become anything more than a look-don't-touch pin-up. Acting honors actually go to Hugh O'Brien who's usually seen in nothing more than a variety of crotch-bulging swimsuits and whose hairy, sun-bronzed torso seems the very distillation of raw male sexuality. (Robertson has only two bare- chest scenes, one of them quite minor, and while he still has an attractive physique, his beefcake appeal is put on better display in the 1959 "Gidget.") Ruth Roman adds some peripheral interest to the proceedings and one wishes more had been done with the character of reluctant gigolo, Ron Husmann.

At least you have to give this one a chance for sheer watchability since LANA TURNER keeps turning up in one great costume after another, proving that even in her forties she was still a glamor girl. The story is trash--as are the main characters--so if you get any thrill out of watching the bronzed bodies enjoying themselves in a potboiler you can call it a guilty pleasure.

Turner is as fickle as they come. Although married to handsome CLIFF ROBERTSON, she's always on the lookout for another gigolo to keep her love life perking. She pays the most attention to HUGH O'BRIAN, who sports a series of brief beach outfits to demonstrate his hunk appeal while he flirts with all the wealthy females on the beach.

If you're still watching, the story leads to a climactic bull fight at a Mexican arena and by that time all the clichés have been thoroughly trampled upon by a ludicrous script and some bad direction.

For Turner's fans, however, it's worth watching for Lana alone. She's lovingly (and carefully) photographed and shows why she was the "it" girl of her generation.

Aimless rich nymphomaniac Lana Turner is one year into an alcoholic marriage with ex-beach boy Cliff Robertson. When one of Lana's earlier beach boy dalliances washes up on the Acapulco shore dead, will grouchy, self-loathing Robertson, egged on by gigolo from Hell Hugh O'Brian learn that his bitter, stormy, (but quite sex-filled) marriage to Lana is exhibit A for the proposition -- "LOVE HAS MANY FACES"?

This movie is one of those that is destined for that dismissive category "so bad its good", on the basis that its star was older than was fashionable for a sex symbol, and many of the men spend much of their time showing their manly torso to over age women. Since the subject is uncomfortable, the safe response for the male reviewer is to giggle, mock, and move on.

But the movie has real strengths despite its garish exterior, and Lana Turner, dressed in best screen siren style, and photographed so that the wrinkles are vague, but the smokin' hot body is in full view, may never have been put to better use in a movie. Hugh O'Brien, too, plays a loathsome character with such bare chested charisma and relish that one could conclude the whole Wyatt Earp TV show thing was epic miscasting. Thios isn't Shakespeare style emoting, but it is good solid acting by people who know how to keep the melodramatic plot fizzing along. Acapulco -- the setting under which all the eye candy is displayed -- looks great, too.

So, if the acting is good, and the melodrama solid, what's the problem? Mostly, Cliff Robertson, whose self-loathing is all encompassing (and really annoying) Also, the movie maker's ambition to get every male torso properly displayed does at time slow the action down to a crawl. Finally, the motivation of some of the characters does not make a whole lot of sense.

But this is a movie worth the time, and not just for the giggles.