Dosierter Mord

Lana Turner plays Adriana, a stage actress who retires to marry wealthy widower financier Charles (Dan O'Herlihy). Charles has an adult daughter Lisa (Karin Mossberg) who resents this and takes up with the hippie types. One of those, med student Johnny (George Chakiris), finds out that Lisa is rich, and takes Lisa for his girlfriend.

Then Daddy dies, leaving Adriana as executor of the will. There's a clause about her having control over disbursement of the estate and her approval of any husband for Lisa (at least before she turns 25), and when Adriana doesn't approve of Lisa and Johnny getting married, Johnny comes up with a devious plan to drive Adriana crazy by spiking her sleeping pills with LSD! The basic plot, that of a parent not approving of a child's marriage, and the two young lovers deciding to do something about it, isn't a bad one. With the right script, as in Pretty Poison, it can be quite good.

Unfortunately, The Big Cube doesn't have the right script. And it certainly doesn't have the right acting. Mossberg is wooden; O'Herlihy is wasted in a bit part; Adriana's playwright Lansdale (Richard Egan) plays the guy who just knows he knows more than all of the doctors; and then there's Lana, who has to play bad acid trip scenes. Oh my.

There are also the other hippies, and the Travilla-designed gowns Lana has to wear. Parts of the movie wind up in "so bad it's good" territory, but too much of it winds up in the realm of just being tedious.

Being a Lana Turner fan, and having seen most of her films, "The Big Cube" had always been amazingly allusive. It's not an easy movie to find, but once I got my hands on it, I was like a little kid at Christmas. I had read reviews on it and seen the disdain for this film over and over again, but I wasn't as horrified by it as most reviewers had me expecting to be. And, strangely enough, that was both a disappointment and a relief.

Lana plays a supposedly great stage actress (though you wouldn't know it based on the horrendous play the film opens with) who retires to marry a wealthy man whose witchy teenage daughter resents Lana's intrusion into their lives. This diva daughter, meanwhile, begins to date a sleazy drug pusher whom neither her father nor Lana approve of. The daughter (played oddly enough with an Eastern European accent of some sort) teams up with her boyfriend to drive poor Lana mad by lacing her medication with LSD.

"The Big Cube" is not a good movie by any stretch of the imagination. Many of the lines and scenes are laughably bad. Lana's LSD-induced hallucination scenes are beyond campy. And seeing Lana in the same film with bare breasts and naked rear-ends is a little disconcerting. But the film will suck you in and have you hooked - much like LSD itself. And in an oddly appealing way, there is a dash of awkwardness thrown in when you see how seriously Turner takes herself in this film. For a woman who was on the verge of 50, she still acted like a young vixen in her 20's.

This vehicle is one of pure exhibitionism. Truly only for Lana fans or those who like trippy '60s flicks. But I have honestly seen much worse. "Valley of the Dolls" is from the same era and in the same vein, but much more ridiculous and tedium inducing. "The Big Cube", strangely enough, resembles a drugged-out version of Turner's 1959 hit "Imitation of Life". Between Lana's successful stage actress character and the conflict she experiences with her step-daughter, plus the on screen reunion with Dan O'Herlihy (who plays her husband here), the similarities are striking enough for me to imagine that the director of this bizarre film must have been a fan of Lana's older melodramas. Having said that, "The Big Cube" is also about as far away from "Imitation of Life" or "Peyton Place" as one can get.

Man, what a mess.

Yes, another example of old-line Hollywood attempting to deal with the pop culture youthquake of the late 1960's, and failing miserably. This thing lurches back and forth between a Douglas Sirk like melodrama and an LSD exploitation film. Jarring changes in pacing and tone abound. Even the accompanying background score shifts disturbingly from string-drenched light orchestral goop to fuzz-laden rock and roll freak-out.

Somehow I get the feeling that both Russ Meyer and Roger Ebert yanked a lot out of this film for their own delirious happening, "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls," released a couple years later. Fans of that craziness should be right at home here.

Lana Turner overacts appropriately here, and I am not going to blame any of the actors here (except for Mossberg -- this was her last film credit, probably appropriately), but I will take the writer, director, and the entire crew to task for their dubious contributions.

The fact that this film was actually produced in Mexico with a Mexican crew (though all American actors and shot in English) tells you a lot of the background. The set design has the over-the-top qualities of Mexican production design has in spades. The homes of the wealthy main characters are drenched in overdone luxurious furnishings. The freaky psychedelic club overflows with more colored lights and oil projection lamps than Bill Graham's storage room. The fashions worn are of the most extreme examples available at that time. These were clothes that might actually be worn by real people you might see on the street (maybe if you lived in Beverly Hills) but, just barely.

The Swedish accent of lead actress Karin Mossberg also throws another off-kilter element into the highly unbelievable proceedings. Explained away by the fact that she's been in boarding school in Switzerland for years, the fact that she looks nothing like the actor portraying her father is another example of the ongoing cognitive dissonance that makes this film a laugh riot. (I would also like to point out the ironic fact, that she did not recognize LSD laced into a sugar cube when exposed to it, due to the fact that she had been sheltered all these years in a boarding school in Switzerland. This conveniently ignores the historical fact that LSD was discovered by Dr. Albert Hoffman in a laboratory...wait for it....wait for it....in Switzerland).

To sum up, if you are ready for a ride into high camp, a film that screams to even the most submissive viewer, "Don't take me seriously," then you will be in a heaven of arranged artificiality. If you liked "The Trip," or "Skidoo" or "Beyond The Valley of the Dolls," and can appreciate all of them on the level of laughing at the fact that anyone could possibly take this kind of foolishness seriously, then you will have a riot of a time with this film.

So many of the great film actresses from the Golden Age were driven hard by their own ambitions and the maintenance of stardom: they seemed unable to gracefully leave the screen and their considerable achievements, and would rather be horrors than has-beens. Joan Crawford's last film was the dreadful Trog, Bette Davis appeared as the Wicked Stepmother, and even Mae West, at age 85, creeped her fans out in the tedious Sextette. I thought of Mae West especially, and her attempt to be sexy while watching Lana Turner negotiate her way in the exploitation film The Big Cube.

If you want to understand how mainstream America envisioned the 1960's counterculture and all that it implied--psychedelic colors, heavy drugs and trippy music--the first 30 minutes of this nutty camp classic have it right: a visit to a San Francisco nightclub is a complete hoot, full of coeds dropping sugar cubes (LSD) into their beer, a freak out in the center of the dance floor so bad the police arrive (rather quickly, as if they had been waiting offstage) to drag the poor victim to rehab--and even, however briefly, a topless dancer!

But to return to Lana Turner, trapped in a bad situation when her husband drowns unexpectedly and she's left with an avaricious stepdaughter whose malicious boyfriend (George Chakiris, who should have fired his agent for casting him in this turkey) decides the two of them should drug mama and drive her slowly mad; Lana hasn't a clue why she's having psychedelic hallucinations, and one hopes she wasn't secretly hoping this was her final chance for an Oscar as she screams and wails and carries on like Godzilla on a bender.

This wild immersion in off-the-wall exploitation is entertaining fun for the first half, and then gets bogged down in the melodrama; Lana's co-star, the young Karen Mossberg, competes with her mother for worst blonde wig, but her wooden acting style and bizarre accent makes her hard to understand, and she never made another film; watch instead for her redheaded BFF, played by Pamela Rodgers, whose perky personality enlivens the screen with a totally zany sex kitten. TV star Richard Egan maintains a stoic attitude throughout the film, a steady if stolid presence.

This is a fun romp "of a kind," and succeeds at that level. For Lana fans, it's probably fairly horrifying to see the persuasive actress of the excellent Bad and The Beautiful and The Postman Always Rings Twice stuck in such a turkey, but in spite of fairly fuzzed-out lenses and a slightly anorexic appearance, the lady does her best and soldiers on.

Lana Turner on an acid trip - a bizarre thought, but this low-budget Mexican production, "The Big Cube," is about just that - you know, "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," the "Sugar Shack" - LSD. And what a bizarre trip it is for all involved.

Turner plays a great theater star, Adriana Roman, who retires to marry Charles Winthrop (Dan O'Herlihy) and comes up against his angry daughter Lisa (Karin Mossberg). No one explains why O'Herlihy's daughter has some sort of foreign accent. Everyone else is American. Anyway, Lisa falls for a sleaze drug dealer and soon to be ex-medical student (George Chakiris) who is after her money. When O'Herlihy dies in a boating accident, the Chakiris character hints to Lisa that they can hurry along the inheritance by - and this is really not clear - either driving Adriana nuts with LSD or using it to kill her. It falls to the playwright with whom Adriana has worked (Richard Egan) to rescue her from the clutches of these two connivers.

The plot is beyond muddled. One day Lisa hates her stepmother, and then the next day they're best buddies. One day Adriana has an acid trip while in a car, and Lisa and her boyfriend take her to a cliff, presumably to throw her over, and Adriana gets away from them and doesn't die. The next day, Adriana goes on another acid trip and tries to throw herself out a window, and Lisa saves her. Why did she save her when she tried to kill her the day before? It's a mess.

The movie is filled with psychedelic parties and horrible acting, particularly from Mossberg, Pamela Rodgers, Lisa's friend, and Carlos East, who plays an overly made-up artist named Lalo.

Turner, approaching 50, does her "Portrait in Black," "Imitation of Life" acting number wearing some horrific wigs. With a simple upswept hairdo, those enormous blue eyes, and petite figure, she's quite beautiful and glamorous, though dressed like she's supposed to be 18; with her hair down, she's a way over the hill ingénue; and with those gargoyle wigs, she looks just plain awful. Her closeups are shot through linoleum. I hate that older beautiful classic film stars had so few alternatives that they turned to these trash movies, but many did.

Campy though not on the camp level of a "Valley of the Dolls" or another Lana Turner film, "Portrait in Black" but some might find it fun. It was fun, but also a little sad for those who enjoyed Lana in "Slightly Dangerous," "Green Dolphin Street," and the Ross Hunter glossy melodramas of the '50s.