Protracted reckoning Acting is about believably portraying characters that never really existed. But sometimes it happens that the life dramas of actors are louder than their screen roles. This happened to the famous Hollywood actress Lana Turner. In 1958, her 14-year-old daughter Cheryl, protecting her mother from being beaten, killed Lana's lover, gangster Johnny Stompanato. A high-profile trial followed, covered in the tabloid press, and Cheryl was eventually acquitted. Based on these events, a novel and a film were written, while the career of Lana Turner herself was almost not affected. Moreover, since then, she has often played mothers suffering from separation from their children or difficult relationships with them.
There is no exception to the melodrama Madame X, released in 1966. Lana Turner plays a woman named Holly Parker, who lives in a luxurious estate with her husband, a promising politician, and a young son. One day, during her husband’s absence, Holly accepts an invitation from a man she likes and comes to his house. But when he tries to hold the woman by force, he loses his balance, falls down the stairs and dies. Holly runs away in panic, unaware that she is being followed by a detective hired by her mother-in-law, who has always disliked her. The mother-in-law, threatening a high-profile lawsuit, demands that the young woman leave for Europe and break up with her husband and son forever. To avoid jeopardizing her husband’s career and future, Holly accepts the offer. Years later, Holly returns to America and connects with a man who learns about her past and begins to blackmail her. Holly kills a blackmailer and finds herself in the dock. She is defended by a young lawyer, for whom this case is the first in his career. Holly has no idea that this lawyer is her grown-up son.
The script of the film is based on the play by the French playwright Alexander Bisson, first staged in 1910 and before that time has already been filmed several times. The film is a classic Hollywood melodrama, in which the heroine is one after another struck by the blows of fate, which she takes with amazing steadfastness. In addition to the magnificent performance of Lana Turner, it is worth noting the performance of other actors - John Forsyth ("The Trouble with Harry" and "Topaz" by Alfred Hitchcock) and Keir Dullea ("2001: A Space Odyssey" by Stanley Kubrick). Perhaps someone will consider the picture a full-length version of the “soap opera” for housewives, but the finale will sympathize with the heroine even not too sentimental people. Despite some old-fashionedness, the film cannot but appeal to lovers of melodramatic stories who like to empathize with the life vicissitudes of the characters.
7 out of 10