Made just before Madame X, which proved to be a box-office hit, Love Has Many Faces was another Lana Turner melodrama designed to maintain her stature as a viable actress.
Grade: C
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This star vehicle–Turner gets top billing–is slightly elevated by Edith Head’s costumes (a dozen different bathing suits that display Turner’s shapely body and legs to an advantage) and Nancy Wilson’s title song.
Haphazardly directed by Alexander Singer, and written by Marguerite Roberts, the film’s subtext is far more interesting than its text.
The lurid tale concerns the lusty intrigues of sex-starved middle-aged American women, fighting for and paying for the amorous gigolos in the lush Mexican site.
When a dead American “beach boy” is washed up on a beach in Acapulco, the police suspect it was murder. Lieutenant Riccardo Andrade (Enrique Lucero) of the Mexican police interviews all the suspects.
Prime among them is Hank Walker (Huge O’Brian), a beach boy-gigolo, always clad in a tight swim suit, who blackmails the lonely vacationing American women.
Cliff Robertson plays the male lead, Pete Jordan, a former beach boy who married a richer, older American femme named Kit (Lana Turner). Kit met Pete when he was selling his blood and then decided to “buy all of him.”
The dead man was wearing a bracelet engraved “Love Is Thin Ice,” which was given to him by Kit, while they had an affair.
Things get a bit more complicated when the young girlfriend of the dead American, Carol Lambert (Stefanie Powers), arrives in Mexico to find out for herself the doings of her former boyfriend.
Cast
Lana Turner as Kit Jordan
Cliff Robertson as Pete Jordan
Hugh O’Brian as Hank Walker
Ruth Roman as Margot Eliot
Stefanie Powers as Carol Lambert
Virginia Grey as Irene Talbot
Ron Husmann as Chuck Austin
Enrique Lucero as Lieutenant Riccardo Andrad
Carlos Montalban as Don Julia
Jaime Bravo as Manuel Pere
Fanny Schiller as Marie
Rene Dupeyron as Ramos
Credits:
Directed by Alexander Singer
Written by Marguerite Roberts
Produced by Jerry Bresler
Cinematography Joseph Ruttenberg
Edited by Alma Macrorie
Music by David Raksin
Production company: Jerry Bresler Productions
Distributed by Columbia Pictures
Release date: Feb 24, 1965 (NYC)
Running time: 105 minutes
Box office: $1,100,000
