Madame X (1966) - film review

Not everyone is pleased when social climber Holly Parker marries up-and-coming statesman John Forsythe.  The latter’s mother takes an immediate dislike to her new daughter-in-law, considering that her son has married beneath him.  Her first impressions are borne out when Holly pursues an extra-marital affair with another man, Phil Benton, whilst her husband is away on business.   Ironically, on the evening when Holly visits Phil to end their relationship, she accidentally knocks him down the stairs and kills him stone dead.  Naturally, the older Mrs Parker gets to hear of this and uses it to blackmail her daughter-in-law into staging her own death.  Adopting a new name, Holly must give up both her husband and son and begin a new life in another country, but she ends up as a broken down alcoholic in Mexico City.  Here she runs into serial blackmailer Dan Sullivan, who discovers her true identity and plans to use her to extort money from the Forsythe family.  To protect her secret, Holly shoots Dan dead and promptly finds herself on death row.  Now, whom do you think Fate sends to defend her at her trial...?

Yes, the plot is a stinker, with more idiotic contrivances than the scriptwriters ever managed to cram into all 356 episodes of Dallas.  Yes, the sentimentality is ladled on so thickly that you can see it, actually see it, dissolve the actor’s make up and burn huge blistering holes in the set (if not the plot) like some viciously acidic compound that is outlawed by the United Nations.  Yes, it is unimaginably crass weepy fodder of the worst kind, the kind of artistic endeavour that has the potential to cause your brain to implode and your internal organs to shrivel up out of shame if you if you take it too seriously.  Yet, somehow, you wouldn’t want it any other way.  Like a massive slab of sugar-rich chocolate, Madame X is not something you will be prescribed by your doctor, but it does you a power of good when your girlfriend/boyfriend has given you the elbow and your treasured pet dog has just emerged from beneath the rear wheels of a sports car looking suspiciously like a hairy jam-coated pancake.

For one thing, it has Lana Turner in it.  That should be enough to salvage any cinematic wreck, even one that feels like the distilled residue of all of Douglas Sirk’s films (without the good bits).  This may not be Miss Turner’s greatest role, but she gives it everything she has and is virtually unrecognisable in the film’s closing scenes.  Turner’s career was already on the decline by the time she made this film but she still has what it takes to make the most mundane and ridiculous scenes appear intense and meaningful.  She out-performs and out-classes every one of her male co-stars (even Latin Romeo Ricardo Montalban) and will have you crying your hearts out in her last few scenes.  Keir Dullea’s career was not too badly tarnished by the seriously bad dialogue he has to spout in this film as a rookie defence lawyer - a year later Stanley Kubrick would cast him as the lead (Dave Bowman) in his sci-fi masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).  Madame X is not, repeat not, the Hollwood weepy’s finest hour, but if your smashed, suicidal or neurotic it’s just about bearable.  You’ll hate yourself in the morning though.  Soap can sometimes leave a very nasty smell.

© Alex Sullivan 2008

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