Madame X (1966)

Film: Madame X (1966)
Stars: Lana Turner, John Forsythe, Ricardo Montalban, Burgess Meredith, Constance Bennet, Keir Dullea
Director: David Lowell Rich
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2020 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress known as an iconic "film sex symbol."  This month, our focus is on Lana Turner-click here to learn more about Ms. Turner (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Most discussions of the career of Lana Turner end where we left it last week, with the three-part punch of Peyton Place (and her sole Oscar nomination), the trial of her daughter Cheryl Crane for the death of Johnny Stompanato, and then her seismic return-to-glory with the blockbuster Imitation of Life.  But Turner lived for over thirty years after Imitation of Life, and a lot of that time she was acting, albeit in smaller and less-memorable roles.  So we're going to end our discussion of her career not in 1959, but instead in the 1960's, with Turner's last starring role in a major Hollywood production, Madame X.  By this time, Turner was in her mid-forties, still gloriously beautiful but clearly a woman whose hard life (and smoking & drinking) had started to wear on her once porcelain demeanor.  She'd picked up two more husbands since Imitation of Life, and her daughter Cheryl was no longer living with her.  She'd had several hits, none as big as Imitation of Life, but she was hardly hurting for work, when Ross Hunter came along and brought her this script.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film unfolds in three acts.  The first is a romance between Holly Parker (Turner), a woman who has recently married Clay Anderson (Forsyth), the crown jewel of a very 'old school money' American family, managed by her disapproving mother-in-law Estelle (Bennett, in her final screen role-she'd die of a brain hemorrhage before this movie was released).  As Clay is constantly away, Holly becomes involved with a local playboy (Montalban), whose death she inadvertently causes when she pushes him in self-defense after she wants to end the affair.  Estelle finds out, and blackmails her daughter-in-law into faking her own death in exchange for covering up the "crime."  Holly does this, moves to Europe, and essentially becomes a wonton woman (there's strong insinuations that she's making money as a prostitute, though it's never fully confirmed), and is` blackmailed by a local drunk Dan Sullivan (Meredith) when he finds out her real identity.  In a twist-of-fate you'd only find in a movie, her attorney ends up being the son she left behind, now played by Keir Dullea, who begins to love this woman not realizing she's his mother.  She dies before the verdict is known to the audience, but not before her husband realizes who she is (she has gone in the press simply as "Madame X," hence the title), not telling his son that he has just tried to save the life of his own mother.

Madame X is kind of a bizarre crossroads of two major trends, one of the 1960's and another of the 1980's.  In the 1960's, the concept of the Grand Dame Guignol films were all the rage, with former beauty queens like Joan Crawford & Bette Davis forced to debase themselves in less glamorous roles, essentially showing that they had in fact aged, and the public could look at them and gawk that youth doesn't last forever.  This certainly happens in Madame X.  Initially it feels like Turner isn't willing to show that she's in fact in her mid-40's, but as the film progresses, vanity goes aside as we see caked on makeup being used to show the passage of time, aging not only in the way she does her hair, but instead by having the gaul to exhibit crow's feet.

This might confuse Madame X with some other films of the era like Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, with Elizabeth Taylor throwing her vanity to the wind, but Madame X is not Virginia Woolf.  This is a pretty heavy melodrama with little to advise it other than if you love voyeuristically looking into the world of the rich-and-damned and a particular type of intense scenery-chewing (this is a genre that's a guilty pleasure for me, hence why it's getting a 3-star rating when it easily could be lower).  Turner is so good at this sort of thing though.  This isn't great acting, but man is it great star-performing.  She sinks into her Holly, and all of the nasty turns her life takes, with aplomb.  Few actresses of her generation would have taken on such a role, their vanity potentially being at stake, but Turner had already had her dirty laundry aired so fervently in real life, what could a fictionalized character do to her legacy?

In a lot of ways, this film is a fore-bearer to the nighttime soap operas of the 1980's, when screen stars of Turner's era such as Barbara bel Geddes and Joan Collins would be forced into continually ridiculous dialogue & chicanery, albeit with the backdrop of obscene wealth & glamour.  Turner would be a part of this world, in fact.  After Madame X, Turner never made a movie of this sort of pedigree again, working in lesser-and-lesser films from smaller studios, trying (and struggling) to establish herself in TV and theater in a way that would be comparable to her time in movies.  The closest she came was a brief stint on Falcon Crest where she went to toe-to-toe with Jane Wyman.  Turner died of throat cancer at the age of 74, with her daughter Cheryl by her side.  She had a hard life, but it was at least a relatively full one.  Next month, we're going to talk about a different Hollywood sex symbol whose life was comparatively brief, but whose death made her immortal.