One of TCM's programming features, at least in June, is "Summer Camp". In this case, it's not going off to the sort of camp that boomer kids did, but the sort of campy, trashy fun that a certain sort of movie offers. On Friday nights, TCM is running a block of that sort of movie. This week, for example, includes Lana Turner in The Big Cube (overnight tonight at 2:15 AM), in which Lana Turner plays a woman whose stepdaughter slips her LSD. I reviewed it quite a few years back, and it's delightfully awful. Anyhow, I mention that movie because I recently watched another movie from the "Summer Camp" series which stars Lana Turner: Love Has Many Faces.
Turner is clearly the star here, although we don't see her for a few minutes. Instead, with the opening credits showing the beautiful side of Acapulco, backed by a song from jazz singer Nancy Wilson, we eventally pan to a group of local kids who find... a dead body washed ashore! The police, led by Det. Andrade, figure out that it's an American "beach boy", the male equivalent of a gold digger who comes down here looking for lonely but rich middle-aged women to try to wheedle money out of.
Cut to Kit Jordan (that's Lana Turner, as if you couldn't tell), who is on a nice-sized boat together with her husband Pete (Cliff Robertson). Andrade comes to the boat to ask the Jordans what they know about the dead guy. The reason for this is that the guy just happened to be wearing a bracelet that had been a gift from Kit. Kit, however, decided she'd rather be married to a different beach boy, a man named Pete Jordan. So Pete is clearly living off of Kit's wealth, and the question of how much he loves her is an open one. They also would both have had motivation for wanting the dead guy dead.
A couple of other beach boys feature, although you could be forgiven for thinking they might be having the sort of relationship Sandy Dennis and Anne Heywood have. Hank Walker (Hugh O'Brian) is trying to seduce Margo (Ruth Roman), although he'll also have no qualms about trying to seduce Kit. He's also got a companion in young Chuck (Ron Husmann) who's nominally going after Irene (Virginia Grey), but as I said sometimes it seems as if the two guys might be using the women as beards or something.
And then flying down from Detroit is young Carol (Stefanie Powers). She was the girlfriend of the guy who washed up on the beach, and she wants to know what happened. She also finds herself getting pursued by Pete, although who wants what from whom gets ever more complicated as the story goes on. If that's not enough, Andrade finally claims that the guy washed up on the beach had written a suicide note, so he's no longer important to the story, which has another half hour to go and takes a turn into the world of bullfighting.
Love Has Many Faces is an absolute mess, and it's easy to see why it would be selected for a TCM programming spotlight on "Summer Camp". It veers all over the place both in plot and in tone, while giving Lana Turner the opportunity to wear a series of glamorous outfits and the guys to wear fairly little. Thankfully, they're at least in square-cut swinning trunks instead of speedos, since they're really all too old to be beach boys. The various twists and turns are more ludicrous than mysterious, but that also serves to make the movie fun if not very good. Perhaps it's not quite as good in that regard as, say, Violent Saturday, but it's certainly entertaining enough.
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