Review of Madame X

Madame X (1966)
6/10
Corny but not too bad
10 April 2016
Warning: Spoilers
Corny melodrama starring Lana Turner, whom I generally don't like much. It has some good moments, though, and the final act is surprisingly touching, as silly as the twist is. Turner plays a woman of low class married into high society, her new husband a politician (John Forsythe). She's often left alone, though, and she soon attracts the unwanted attentions of Ricardo Montelban. He dies accidentally, but her mother-in-law assumes she murdered her lover and Turner gets banished. Later on, she hooks up with Burgess Meredith and has a drunken, semi-criminal relationship with him. He ends up dead, too, and then the son that she abandoned (now played by Keir Dullea) defends her in court, never knowing who she really is. The best scenes are the ones with Meredith. Yes, this is a movie where Lana Turner kills both Khan and the Penguin, but it's less campy than one might think (unlike Turner's following film, the hilarious acid trip movie The Big Cube). I think some just genuinely like the melodrama. I don't, but, in the end, it's not too bad a film.
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