By Love Possessed

What can be more laughable than a film that attempts to skewer wasp hypocrisy and small-town stereotyping, but uses such stereotyping in it's presentation of characters? This is an unabashed attempt to gather the Peyton Place fans by bringing back Lana Turner to a New England setting in Autumn, along with the period Boy-Man of angst, George Hamilton. While Turner is so good that she can do this type of role in her sleep, and still come off well, the rest of the cast is pretty wooden, especially Efrem Zimbalist. It's easy to see why he could portray an FBI agent on TV so well.

Nothing more than a turgid melodrama, so popular at the time, filmed in color with a panoramic view so that it could lure the women of 1961 away from the B&W small-screen TV daytime soap operas, to see the exact same stuff on a big screen. Pass on it and get Peyton Place instead, unless you're a Lana Turner fanatic.

By Love Possessed is your high gloss soap opera 50s early 60s style. Had it been done at Universal it would have had Douglas Sirk directing and Rock Hudson in the lead. Here we have Efrem Zimbalist starring and John Sturges who's a bit lost in this genre directing.

Possibly Sirk passed on this one. The drama centers around the law firm in a most conservative small town. Senior partner is Thomas Mitchell who does not look well at all, possibly at the beginning of his final illness and his partners are son-in-law Zimbalist and Jason Robards. Zimbalist is your hail fellow well met and a bit stuck up Ivy League type, a bit thick in his dealings with wife Barbara Bel Geddes and son George Hamilton.

As for Robards he's married to Lana Turner, but he's not been up to that challenge recently. This was still the era of the Omnipresent Code and impotence and its causes are not spoken of by polite movie characters. Turner turns to Zimbalist for some action.

Young Hamilton repeats his sensitive youth character from his role in Home From The Hill in the previous year. He's got good, but neurotic girl Susan Kohner on the string, but his hormones cry out for the town teen tramp Yvonne Craig. She and her mother Claire Carleton are the ones you really remember from this film, their performances have some real bite to them.

Efrem Zimbalist was starring in 77 Sunset Strip at the time at Warner Brothers and they were hoping to transition him to a big screen name like they did with James Garner. That was not in the cards for Zimbalist, but he did get to co-star with a screen legend in Lana Turner.

Not his fault, but the way Zimbalist's role was written I could never develop a rooting interest for him to overcome and deal with his problems. Quite frankly, he's a fathead. Turner also seemed a bit off kilter for a screen sex symbol in this film.

But Lana's fans will love her.

Lana Turner, Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., Jason Robards, Barbara Bel Geddes, Susan Kohner and George Hamilton are - if we are to believe the title - "By Love Possessed" in this 1961 film which also stars Thomas Mitchell and Yvonne Craig.

As the name of the movie indicates, this is a huge, glossy, color soap opera featuring beautiful fall scenery, huge homes and the attractive people in them, fancy cars and lots of driving scenes. The only house which isn't sumptuous belongs to the supposedly super-wealthy Helen - in her scenes, she looks like she lives in a Motel 6.

BLP is supposed to be about SEX. Hamilton gets it; Lana can't get it so she rides horses; Efrem can't get it so he works late at the office; Kohner can't get it so she looks at papers in her safety deposit box; Mitchell can't get it because he's too old; Robards can't have it because he's a cripple; Bel Geddes can't get it because she's in a marriage where the couple has drifted apart; and Craig has enough for all of them.

The couples -- Marjorie and Julius (Lana and Jason), Clarissa and Arthur (Bel Geddes and Zimbalist), Helen and Warren (Kohner and Hamilton) do a lot of talking and Warren and Veronica (Craig) do a lot of making out.

It all adds up to a big zero that obviously was meant to cash in on Turner's big success with "Imitation of Life," as was "Portrait in Black" but in both films, they forgot to have Douglas Sirk direct.

The acting is fairly superficial except for Jason Robards and Barbara Bel Geddes. Bel Geddes, a wonderful actress, creates a real character with real emotions, sticks with it, and is a success. Robards, famous for his performances in Eugene O'Neill works, is out of place here; he has no one to play off of, as he has to act with Zimbalist and Turner.

The very pretty Yvonne Craig, who would have better success in television, pouts well. Susan Kohner has none of the allure she displayed in "Imitation of Life" but with the help of an ugly wig, creates a sad character nonetheless.

Hamilton is in the Tony Perkins role, which Perkins would have done a lot better. Hamilton is someone I prefer as a personality who parodies himself. When he attempts to act, it's painful.

Zimbalist, who always comes off as a rich society person, comes off as a rich society person here. Very handsome, with a fine speaking voice, he never has had much range. Not that he needed a lot here, but he needed more than he had.

Lana Turner looks lovely, though her fashions don't register as they have in past films. She could always pull off an adulterous drunk - I personally don't think she has enough to do. There are too many other characters.

If you're going to do a Lana Turner movie, I say make it a Lana Turner movie and let's see us some more Lana! The end of the film is pure Hollywood hokum. So are the beginning and the middle. This type of film is usually fun if nothing else; this one is tedious.

Likely to be lumped together with Turner's other late 50's/early 60's glossy, starring vehicles, this is actually more of an ensemble piece, based on a large, sprawling novel, and Turner is denied a chance to really take the reins. The plot (which is based on only the last part of the 25 year-long story in the novel) concerns small town lawyer Zimbalist, who, in the matter of a day or two, discovers that his wife (Bel Geddes) is discontent, his son (Hamilton) resents him, his father-in-law (Mitchell) is mishandling the firm's funds and his partner's wife (Turner) has the hots for him. Turner's husband (Robards) is impotent as the result of a car accident, so she turns to the bottle for comfort and eventually to Zimbalist. Meanwhile, Hamilton is fed up with the expectations of his family and of the town in which they live and disses fiancée Kohner for town floozie Craig. This kicks off a series of troublesome events which wind up affecting all of the characters, bringing some of them closer together, but destroying others. The film has a splendid musical score by Elmer Bernstein (even if his music for Turner and Zimbalist's fateful meeting sounds more apt for a swashbuckler than an illicit rendezvous.) It's also helmed by the rather solid Sturges, though it seems he wasn't the man best-suited to material like this. An irresistible cast flounders and flops it's way through the strained storyline with only the occasional unintentional laugh to make it bearable. Zimbalist, never the most dynamic actor, lacks the charisma to hold up the film. Robards is given little to do and does pretty little with it. Hamilton (well-cast as Zimbalist's son) never conveys the necessary emotion or depth for his role. Mitchell quite easily steals most of his scenes with his customary bombast and presence. Turner (decked out in one of her worst-ever hairstyles and looking quite bloated facially at times) is given a smallish, fairly ludicrous role to play. Her clothes in the film, despite having a name designer doing them, cover all the bases from drab to garish to unflattering to preposterous with only one or two making the grade of appealing. Apart from that, Turner is often bland and wooden, not to mention insincere and bored-looking. Tellingly, she shares no scenes with the stage-trained Bel Geddes who, even with virtually no make-up and even duller clothing, completely waltzes off with the acting honors in the film. The glamor-proof Bel Geddes adds texture and feeling to yet another silly role in the film (her character is in the hospital for a week due to an accident on the tennis court??) Kohner is a close second, injecting emotion into her cipher-like role of the dejected sweetheart. The real hoot is Craig, who refers to herself in the third person and plays the town squeeze with notable haughtiness (her mom in the film is also a brief treat.) It's got expensive (but strangely unappealing) sets, luxurious trappings, a rather seedy storyline and a name cast, but somehow remains dull, drab and unengaging. Worth a look for pre-"Dallas" Bel Geddes and for fans of Kohner and Turner completists.

By Love Possessed (1961)

In the vein of a Douglas Sirk film this is bordering on some kind of flawed masterpiece. It's flawed, it has some stumbles in the writing and story, and it really is awfully conversational and slow--but there is a very serious probing soap opera tone here that's wonderful. Maybe the single largest limitation is that the nexus of all these searching yearning people is a law firm, which lacks a level of romanticism (no offense to all those attorneys out there). And it's all filmed with a flat bright light that smacks of indifference--something you could never accuse Sirk of.

But the best of this is fabulous and cumulative. It gets better as it goes. The writing--the story and the dialog both--is stunning. It might be melodrama, but it has nuance and truth on its side. In fact, the ability to show the bottled up emotional train wreck that much of America experienced in the 1950s is remarkable. There are all these good people, yearning people, who can't quite express themselves. They're smart, they know their dilemma, but they've been so trained to simply be good and lead noble lives that they forgot how to express themselves. Except maybe through words, careful and precious words.

The cast here is stellar. In the lead is an actor at his best, Efrem Zimbalist Jr., who became much better known as a t.v. actor (mainly in the ten year run of "F.B.I."). He's sort of perfect, even if you might find him restrained and polished and unexciting. That's exactly his part, and he plays it with inner conviction. Next to him in the law firm is Jason Robards, a more impressive Hollywood staple, who has a smaller role but another perfect one. Their boss is the aging and almost bumbling Thomas Mitchell, who is by 1961 a kind of legend in the industry, and he's great, adding depth and warmth to the place, as much as a brightly lit law firm has human warmth.

The women are equally strong, from the ever understated and impressive Barbara Bel Geddes as the wife of one lawyer and Lana Turner (no less) as the wife of another. The two children of note are a somewhat dry George Hamilton and an increasingly convincing and moving and subtle Susan Kohner, who are struggling with a rocky relationship. But then, everyone is in a rotten relationship--that's what the movie is about, as the title suggests. Throw in the great Everett Sloane (from "Citizen Kane" and so forth) and Carol O'Connor (the lead in "All in the Family") and you see you have an uncompromising ensemble situation.

Yes, you might say these are all actors of a certain stripe, and no Brando or Newman or Monroe or Janet Leigh or the other flashier names of the day. That's true, and it's partly why the movie eventually sinks in deep and is effective. By the end I was really moved. It seems I'm in mixed company here, as some reviews show a total disconnect (and disparagement) of the film. I can see why someone would say that--and even if you like the overblown and moody Sirk kind of movies (the second "Imitation of Life" above all) you might see this as a, uh, pale imitation.

Maybe. Or maybe it's its own beast, with superb and probing writing, whatever the contrived situation might be behind it all. I also found the first half hour almost unbearable--it's so bland in the filming and so slow in the talk talk talk and so subtle in the non-emotional development of relationship. If you abandon ship too soon you'll miss the best of it. And if you expect a more naturalistic movie than this bottled up play-on-a-screen you'll be disappointed. It is actually based on a book which stormed the New York Times bestseller list in 1957, and was nominated for a Pulitzer (and was later condemned for its pro-establishment and slightly anti-semitic content).

Take this movie for what it is, it might surprise you as much as it did me, giving it some effort after all.