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Show Madame X... A Little Benzidrene Please Because Madame X stirs the emotions so deeply the theatre will remain dark for a brief pencd at the end of the picture. respectfully submit that a brief period of darkness is entirely insufficient. What they should do is send the ushers up and down the aisles after each feature spraying the audience with benzidrene. (A couple of shots during the feature wouldn't hurt either.) What we have' in Madame X is another sorry example of Lana Turner being abused by everybody in sight. It all starts out when she marries the richest man in all of Fairfield County Connecticut (John Forsythe). Unfortunately his mother (Constance Bennett) doesn't approve of the match. Lana, you see, was a shopgirl in San Francisco, and although the Forsythe house is big, it isnt big enough for the both of them. Well John Forsythe is a busy man in the diplomatic corps. (He explains that he has contracted an old family ailment, "Washington Fever.) The result is that he has to spend a lot of time in out of the way places such as Paris, Berlin and NorthAf-rica- , and Lana Turner has to spend a lot of time at home alone with the I kid. To break the boredom she de- cides to spend a couple of nights on the town with Ricardo Montalban. By the time John Forsythe gets home they are at the end of "six perfect wcsks Lana knows she's done wrong and all off. He goes to tell Ricardo its He answer. an for no take wont level falls down the stairs of his split apartment, killing himself at precisely the moment Constance Bennetts to break private detective decides down the door. Lana escapes, but Constance has the goods on her. Constance Bennett, that fiend in human form, then announces that to have poor Lana Turner is going and suicide committed to pretend she assumed an under Switzerland live in hidname. (It is here that all that a den animosity about Lana being t can help shopgirl comes out, "you can what you are any more than you Lana agrees help what you arent.") and spends the next half hour riding on European trains and turns down Christian the concert pianist who saves her from freezing to death in a snowdrift. At the end of all this she meets and Burgess Meredith in Mexico City tips him off about her past (inad vertently of course). Burgess drags her back to New York on a ruse and there announces that hes going to shake down John Forsythe. (John, in the meantime, has become governor of all of Connecticut and has the Presidential nomination in his hip pocket.) Before Burgess can move the plot into high gear Lana shoots him and is arrested. She comes to trial under an assumed name (X) and is defended by her very own son.' Things get pretty inthick in the trial as indignity on woman. dignity is piled on the poor The movie ends before the jury comes in thats the only good part about the whole thing. The screenplay for Madame X was written by Jean Holloway whose daytime serial credits are legion. Miss silver Holloway brings it all to the hands. human untouched by screen Burgess Meredith gives a pretty good performance as does Constance The rest are on a par with the movie itself. Madame X gets two stars. One of them is for the brief period of darkness. It lets you get out of the theatre unnoticed. Ben-ne- the guide, may 19. 1966 page t. 21 |