O Amor tem Muitas Faces

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!

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.

Nancy Wilson's opening-credits title song tells us that "love has many faces...and I mean to kiss every one!" Unfortunately, there are more hisses than kisses happening here, as an attractive cast lounges sleepily in the cartoonish paradise of Acapulco yet nobody seems to be having a good time. Lana Turner (tanned and coiffed to a fare-thee-well) plays a wealthy woman who used to run around with beach boys and gigolos until she married one (Cliff Robertson, looking dour); when an ex-paramour washes up dead on the beach, Lana isn't a suspect in his death but certainly acts like she is. Hugh O'Brian plays a virile, narcissistic stud wooing vacationer Ruth Roman, while Stefanie Powers turns up as another former lover of the deceased rivaling Turner for Robertson's affections. It might be too silly--and slurpy-slow--for words were it not for some amusingly catty digs and an unintentionally hilarious bit where Lana meets an angry bull head-on. The fashions and settings are ravishing, so there's really no need for all these people to be so bitter and petty. Money seems to flow between them like water, and everyone looks great in (and out) of their clothes. Alexander Singer directs the whole thing with one eye shut; alas, his film is half-asleep. ** from ****

Much the truly best thing is still the credits with Nancy Wilson's superb performance of the Raksin-Davis title song. This is 60's "fashion sound," more like you'd expect for an Audrey Hepburn caper.

But this is pithier than the light charm of Audrey. This is more interesting than that could ever quite be. This is Lana Turner and that was always interesting, because of all major stars, she seemed most ultimately consumed by perdition. The movie often seems awful, but the relationships are so loose that the beginnings, middles and ending all seem at least possible, given all the elements of the milieu.

And Turner's wonderfully absurd costumes are thoroughly matched by an amazing performance of sustained pornography by Hugh O'Brien, as Hank, fantastically lascivious--with no more thought of giving it up to stay out of hell than Don Giovanni. And his wardrobe is almost as varied as hers is--there are several changes of beach boy bikini. It needs to be: He suggests nothing so much as Stompanato, and this is Turner's most interesting post-Stompanato picture besides 'Imitation of Life'. In both of these her burden of falseness is carried with as much courage as something that lonely must be--if we are to believe Eric Root in his 1996 book regarding her confession circa 1985 to him in New York while viewing a TV documentary or clip about the murder-how her career could not be interrupted by this moment of passionate horror; and how this may or may not have been the selfish decision to make when her daughter was involved. It may have made her a great actress from time to time; she certainly had never been more than very good before, and she was simply execrable occasionally, as in 'The Merry Widow'--an unspeakable performance, all stiffness and ignorance.

Harold Robbins's novel 'Where Love Has Gone' was based on the Stompanato-Turner affair and she wouldn't speak to him or shake his hand when once she was introduced to him.

But later, she would be cordial to him when a career move--that of 'The Survivors' for television by Robbins and co-starring George Hamilton--presented itself as expedient.

She settled rather as comfortably as possible into BEING "imitation of life"--and it was always fascinating.

Fidelity is a subject that comes up in the relationship of Kit (Turner) and Pete, her husband (Cliff Robertson) quite a lot in the movie; and thus it seems about as relative a value as possible given the circumstances, the setting (there are the well-known photographs of Lana and Stompanato in Acapulco). That makes it sad, because fidelity as something difficult is common enough (most of us have experienced its seeming near-impossibility), but here it seems as if, no matter how things appear briefly, it has ultimately vanished, is 100% inaccessible--in any arena of relationship. When Pete tells Kit after the bullfight that his new love interest,played by Stephanie Powers (there to investigate the death of a friend of hers, another lover of Kit's), "has something we all once had...a conscience," there is an interesting invective about "buying monogrammed hair shirts" that bursts from Turner's lips--the kind of line certain kinds of lazy money will definitely buy.

So that, in the title song are "play the field, I told my fickle heart"..and "I said love has many faces, and I mean to kiss every one.."And then there is "that's how it used to be, till you smiled at me, and then I knew, that not any of the many faces was love..till I looked at you.."

What one wished both.

Much of 'Love Has Many Faces' may seem trashy and campy soap opera, but it's actually tragic, it's about something that happened, even if they only halfway knew it,even if they were just trying to do something commercial.

She still looked lusciously beautiful at that age (about 45), and this age has a strange feel to it, as she goes about playing the playgirl seemingly endlessly, as if still an ingenue--reminding one of the story of the revered Bishop Nonnus of Antioch and Pelagia, the leading actress of the city, as recalled by the Desert Fathers; and when she first entered a chuch, and was overcome with the fear of God. Various "discoveries of God" happened to Lana in the last decade of her life (sometimes it was Shirley Maclaine, alas); she "surveyed the field" for God, too, it seems, and there you have it: one of the most authentic and inimitable lives of Hollywood history.

Some nice scenery of Mexico's beach playground Acapulco and some fine young specimens on the beach are the main attraction for Love Has Many Faces. As a movie it has some of the themes of Tennessee Williams's The Roman Spring Of Mrs. Stone if it were done by Jackie Susann.

Lana Turner gets top billing here as an aging heiress who actually married her beach boy toy Cliff Robertson. But one of the boy toy set washes up on the beach dead. His girl friend Stefanie Powers comes in from the States to find out the story. As Robertson and Turner are in a rut of some kind, Cliff makes a play for Powers. And while that's going on Hugh O'Brian who is about as far from the stern and morally upright Wyatt Earp sets his sights on Turner.

Best in the cast is another aging heiress Ruth Roman who lets nothing slip by her eyes without a comment. Definitely Marguerite Roberts the writer gave her the best lines.

I guess fun in the sun in Acapulco is reason enough for doing the film for the players. They've all done worse, but they've all done better.