Lovesusti The Worst Film Ever

AshUnow This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Brainsbell The story-telling is good with flashbacks.The film is both funny and heartbreaking. You smile in a scene and get a soulcrushing revelation in the next.

Zlatica One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

nomoons11 If you can't draw the parallels between this film and the 2 I mention then you need to do some research and see this film (from a book) is ripped right from the the news of the day with a pinch of an old Hollywood classic thrown in.An aspiring artist from a well to do family is always being told what to do by her domineering mother. She loves men and and isn't ashamed of showing it. One day she meets a war hero at her gallery opening and takes a liking to him. He meets the mother and she likes him but his impression of her quickly changes as she shows her true colors. Instead of the big wedding the mother wants, they both sneak off and get married. The next day he's off to the war for a year. She has a baby and from this he has to work somehow. He's idealistic and wants no help from the mother but she intervenes without him knowing so he'll work for her...something he doesn't want. Years of this life of alcohol and getting whatever you want has wore him down and his wife feels the same. She goes back to her sex with other men ways and he's had it. The daughter they have is impressionable and it affects her greatly. Segway to the crux of the film...the daughter murders her mothers boyfriend. Of course there's more to it than that. Turns out this 15 year old was sleeping with her mother boyfriend all along.This film was a soap opera all the way though. It wasn't badly made but it should or could have just been a TV movie. The content is shocking to me for it's day. A 15 year old girl kills her mother's boyfriend who she was sleeping with also. Sound Familiar? A mix of Mildred Pierce and Lana Turner's real life.With the exception of the redone story, my main issue is Mike Conners. He was made for TV, and in this, it shows. He's just not movie material to me. It's obvious why he was more successful in TV and not in film. Bette Davis plays a character she's done before. A mother figure or leading lady figure who dominates everyone in the house. Susan Hayward does a grand job but it was all for naught in this rehash from the past.Not a bad film folks, it's just that I've seen it before in other incarnations. Watch it to see how similar it looks and feels to a modern day Soap Opera.

bkoganbing The team of Paramount Pictures, author Harold Robbins, and director Edward Dmytryk scored a big box office success with The Carpetbaggers in 1964 at the box office and so Paramount decided to keep the team going and adapted another of Robbins's novels for the big screen, Where Love Has Gone. Unlike The Carpetbaggers which employed a bunch of old Hollywood names for a story about an older era of Hollywood, this film was located in San Francisco. But the story is unmistakably modeled on the infamous Johnny Stompanato murder from 1958 where Lana Turner's daughter Cheryl Crane killed her mother's mobster boyfriend with a butcher knife. Although our protagonist here is a sculptress, no mistaking where Harold Robbins got his plot from. Sculptress Susan Hayward the daughter of wealthy San Francisco dowager Bette Davis has her live-in boyfriend killed in front of her by her daughter Joey Heatherton. The boyfriend of Hayward who was living with both of them was also doing both of them. He was on the books as Hayward's manager, but he was better at double entry housekeeping than double entry bookkeeping. The arrest is a scandal and the family gathers to protect Heatherton, a call goes out to Phoenix, Arizona where her father Michael Connors has been living for years out there making a success at his profession of architecture. Lawyer George MacReady wants to see a supportive family in the picture.It's a pretty sordid story and Where Love Has Gone has a long flashback detailing the marriage of Hayward and Connors and the constant meddling of Davis in their lives. He took to drink and she went back to her former hobby of promiscuity. The story sticks pretty close to the events as unfolded in the Stompanato homicide, but the ending that Harold Robbins has for his characters is all his own.The main attraction of Where Love Has Gone is the one and only teaming of screen divas Bette Davis and Susan Hayward. In fact way back when Hayward had a small bit in Davis's film The Sisters, but now they were both legends. And like David and that other legend Joan Crawford, she and Hayward didn't become bosom buddies and there were some flareups according to books about both actresses, but nothing on the line of the grand feuds that Davis had with such folks as Joan Crawford and Miriam Hopkins back in the day.As for Lana Turner she remained closemouthed about the book and movie of Where Love Has Gone, but you have to believe there were some hurt feelings there. Where Love Is Gone is trash, it doesn't pretend to be anything else. And the chance to see Hayward and Davis sharing a screen and spitting fire should not be missed.

lazarillo This movie is regarded today as an unintentional camp classic. Having seen Edward Dymitryk's black comedy "Bluebeard", I think the director might have been in on the joke, but I'm not so sure anybody else was. As others have said, this is loosely based on the real-life Hollywood scandal where Lana Turner's teenage daughter Cheryl Crane stabbed Turner's gangster boyfriend Johnny Stompanato to death in a domestic violence incident. Somehow this movie manages to make the real incident even sleazier by positing an actual sexual relationship between the daughter and the gangster. Susan Hayward gives a very earnest (and, thus, unintentionally campy) performance as the Lana Wood character. She's made a scupltress here rather than an actress, which is hilarious because, while a vapid bimbo can be an actress, it usually takes some depth to be a sculptor. But even more hilarious her manager (Dr. McCoy--I mean DeForrest Kelley) claims that her "talent" is based on her behaving like an "alley-cat". Well, the real Lana Turner could reportedly alley-cat with the best of them, but it never seemed to do much for her acting.Speaking of alley-cats though, Joey Heatherton is severely miscast as the daughter. Even if she could act, Heatherton was 20 then and looked even older. (They should have cast Tuesday Weld, but a good performance would have stuck out like a sore thumb here). Heatherton was a minor sex symbol of the era, who could fill out a mean sweater and reputedly slept her way through the entire Rat Pack. I did find her kinda sexy, but I also kinda wanted to strangle her (OK, not just kinda) because she has a horrible screechy, petulant voice that make nails on a chalkboard seem sonorous (she's slightly better in "Bluebeard" where she at least busts out her bust after aurally torturing the poor viewers for the entire movie). And speaking of torture, Betty Davis gives a performance as Hayward's domineering mother that somehow manages to seem both incredibly hammy and lethargically phoned-in.The male actors really don't have a chance against three generations of scenery-chewing harpies, but they try. DeForrest Kelley gets to earnestly deliver some real unintentional howlers (between this and "Night of the Lepus" maybe he should have stuck to the small screen). Mike Connor's plays the nice-guy father/ex-husband--a character who was conspicuously absent in the real-life Turner tragedy. This is not as enjoyable as "Bluebeard" (Heatherton and her sweaters really don't make up for a whole bevy of naked Europe-babes), but if you like unitentional camp look no further.

moonspinner55 Society sculptress in San Francisco marries a war veteran, a man who quickly turns to the bottle after failing to carve out his own niche away from the realm of his domineering mother-in-law; sometime later, the daughter they share apparently kills mom's lover in a jealous rage. Harold Robbins' best-selling roman à clef lifts its subplot from the real-life Lana Turner-Johnny Stompanato case, and those bits and pieces are rather interesting. However, much of the movie is spent with bickering marrieds Susan Hayward and inert Michael Connors trading barbs, and the promising idea loses its impetus and becomes a stillborn soaper. Connors, heavily made-up and with lacquered black hair that never changes during the story's many years, twitches and twists his mouth into a grimace throughout the entire picture, only coming to life while tipsy in a brief dinner scene. Hayward fares better, but her slurpy, silly lines are pure camp ("You're a kept-man, not a war hero! And a drunk! A drunk! A DRUNK!"). Bette Davis is pretty much wasted as Hayward's mother (who would've thought a film co-starring these two high-powered ladies could be so dull?) and Joey Heatherton scowls continuously as the teenager in trouble (I loved her retort though about how she lost her virginity: "It happened horseback riding!"). Tatty-looking picture has some fun trappings (such as Susan's round bed, Princess telephones, and fashions that often match the room decor), but the plot is lazy and Edward Dmytryk's direction is completely rote. Film opens with picture-postcard shots of San Francisco coupled with a cheesy title tune crooned by Jack Jones, which unbelievably netted an Oscar nomination! *1/2 from ****