Madame X (1966)
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List Price: $14.98
Features
• Color
• HiFi Sound
• NTSC
In Theaters : 27 April, 1966
Video Release : 01 January, 1998 |
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Madame X (1966) Customer Reviews
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♥♥♥♥♥
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"Never end on a dangling insult!"
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Scandal has wreaked havoc on many a star's career, but it gave Lana Turner a third-act career boost. La Lana's audience wanted -- and got -- scenes like the one here in which she's told by her live-in-mother-in-law, Constance Bennett, "You're an unfit mother, guilty of adultery. Your prosecutor will say you killed your lover. Even if a clever attorney gets you off, the mud will cling!" (Never mind that Turner hadn't killed smoothie Richardo Montalban -- in fact, she'd been in the midst of calling him "A contemptible, rotten . . ." when he'd replied, "A contemptible, rotten what? Never end on a dangling insult!" and just then had fallen down a convenient staircase to his
death.)
To protect her son, and husband John Forsythe, from the scandal that would drag them all down, Turner agrees to fake her death and start life anew in Europe. This hoary plot has made the rounds since the silent era, but this is the deluxe edition, pumped up by its producer with gowns, jewels, and wigs, in hopes that we won't notice Turner's too old for the role. The over-the-top script keeps us laughing out loud as Turner spends the next twenty years going from man to man, drink to drink, trying to forget.
When she runs out of dough, Turner ships out on a Mexico-bound tramp steamer, where she downs absinthe with scummy Burgess Meredith, telling him "I've come a long way down. Would you prefer the Rolls or the Mercedes this morning?' they used to ask me." Old enough to recognize this plot from earlier Madame X movies, Meredith realizes who Turner is and tricks her into returning to the United States, so he can blackmail her husband. Figuring out Meredith's game, Turner tells him, "Listen, scavenger, I crawl in the same gutter, but I'm not a beast of prey!" and then proves her point by shooting him dead.
When she's tried for murder, she's defended by her own grown son, Keir Dullea, who does not realize that she's his own mother. "I don't have much to leave my son," Turner says on the stand, "only a lie that his mother was clean and good. I killed to keep my son from knowing what I'd become. If time were turned back, I'd kill again." Turner, Forsythe, Bennett and even a jury member weep copiously throughout this speech -- there's not a dry eye on the set. Turner collapses and dies, but not before telling Dullea, "When you marry, it's important to live alone" -- as if that's how she got into this mess.
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