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Really Surprised!

Great Film overall

Absolutely Fantastic

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

Did anyone else think that that Susan Heyward was a little old to play this part, having babies, etc? Aren't she and Bette Davis close in age? I will say that Bette Davis has never looked better. She always had those beautiful eyes but she made an awesome silver haired fox in this movie. And how handsome the man playing the "husband" role. I've always liked that actor (name escapes me) but didn't realize what a wicked handsome man he was in those days! I love the female players and love watching these classic movies, no matter how camp. But the selection of "Mother/daughter" struck me as odd.I gravitate to the movies with these two actors. Strong women both. And I loved the fireworks in the movie.

Completely lurid overdone melodrama. Everybody but Jane Greer overacts to within an inch of their lives. What twisted gene pool could possibly produce Bette Davis, Susan Hayward and Joey Heatherton as relatives let alone mother, daughter and granddaughter? Full of back stage dissension between Susan Hayward and Bette Davis as power plays were staged and blocked although surely anything Bette could have done to her character would have been an improvement. She regarded it with scorn ever after dismissing it as that piece of junk she did to pay for her daughter's wedding. A blatant rip-off of Lana Turner's tragedy and full of soapy goodness!!

On April 4, 1958, Lana Turner's daughter, Cheryl Crane, stabbed Turner's boyfriend, underworld figure Johnny Stompanato, to death, in what was later deemed a justifiable homicide. This scandalous incident served as the inspiration for Harold Robbins' 1962 novel "Where Love Has Gone," his follow-up to "The Carpetbaggers." And this tawdry novel was given the A-list treatment by Paramount two years later, in a film that was critically lambasted but commercially successful. The picture featured the cream of Hollywood talent both in front of and behind the camera, but turned out to be a highly melodramatic affair, replete with florid dialogue and soap operalike qualities. But is it fun to watch today, almost five decades later? Oh, yes, indeed!The film cleaves into two fairly discrete sections. In the first, we meet Luke Miller, an aspiring architect (played by Mike Connors) whose daughter, Danni, has just killed his ex-wife's lover in San Francisco. (Fifteen-year-old Danni, it should be mentioned, is played by future sex symbol Joey Heatherton, 20 here and almost unrecognizable as a redhead.) In flashback, we see how Luke first met Danni's mom, a sculptress and artist named Valerie Hayden (Susan Hayward), daughter of society matron Mrs. Gerald Hayden (Bette Davis, despite the fact that Bette was only 10 years older than Susan), and how their marriage soon dissolved due to alcoholism and infidelity. In the film's second half, we are witness to Danni's juvenile hearing and see the aftermath of the murder, including a short sojourn in blackmailing territory."Where Love Has Gone" features some beautiful sets and makes excellent use of its S.F. locales. It also features a catchy Sammy Cahn/James van Heusen theme song, warbled by Jack Jones, and eye-catching costumes by famed designer Edith Head. Edward Dmytryk's direction (he had previously worked with Susan on 1955's "Soldier of Fortune," though never before with Bette, and had just directed the film adaptation of "The Carpetbaggers") is typically expert, and the supporting cast (including DeForest Kelley as a cynical art critic, here two years pre-"Trek"; the always hissable George Macready; Jane Greer, who had appeared with Susan in 1947's "They Won't Believe Me"; and Whit Bissell, who seems to have appeared in half the films ever made!) is just fine. But of course, the main selling point of this film has to be the first and only pairing of two of Hollywood's greatest actresses, Bette Davis and Susan Hayward (two of MY personal favorites, at least). These two supposedly didn't get along well on the set (surprise, surprise), but sure do have a cutting and nasty chemistry on screen! Susan's final courtroom speech may be the film's finest moment, thespianwise, although Mike Connors, here three years prior to beginning his eight-year run as TV's Mannix, provides the film with its most ingratiating performance. In short, "Where Love Has Gone" is certainly nobody's idea of a great film, much less "high art," but yes, it sure is fun to watch. And really, where else are you going to see the "Brooklyn Bombshell," Susan Hayward, handle a blowtorch?

This movie is regarded today as an unintentional camp classic. Having seen Edward Dymitryk's black comedy "Bluebeard", I think the director might have been in on the joke, but I'm not so sure anybody else was. As others have said, this is loosely based on the real-life Hollywood scandal where Lana Turner's teenage daughter Cheryl Crane stabbed Turner's gangster boyfriend Johnny Stompanato to death in a domestic violence incident. Somehow this movie manages to make the real incident even sleazier by positing an actual sexual relationship between the daughter and the gangster. Susan Hayward gives a very earnest (and, thus, unintentionally campy) performance as the Lana Wood character. She's made a scupltress here rather than an actress, which is hilarious because, while a vapid bimbo can be an actress, it usually takes some depth to be a sculptor. But even more hilarious her manager (Dr. McCoy--I mean DeForrest Kelley) claims that her "talent" is based on her behaving like an "alley-cat". Well, the real Lana Turner could reportedly alley-cat with the best of them, but it never seemed to do much for her acting.Speaking of alley-cats though, Joey Heatherton is severely miscast as the daughter. Even if she could act, Heatherton was 20 then and looked even older. (They should have cast Tuesday Weld, but a good performance would have stuck out like a sore thumb here). Heatherton was a minor sex symbol of the era, who could fill out a mean sweater and reputedly slept her way through the entire Rat Pack. I did find her kinda sexy, but I also kinda wanted to strangle her (OK, not just kinda) because she has a horrible screechy, petulant voice that make nails on a chalkboard seem sonorous (she's slightly better in "Bluebeard" where she at least busts out her bust after aurally torturing the poor viewers for the entire movie). And speaking of torture, Betty Davis gives a performance as Hayward's domineering mother that somehow manages to seem both incredibly hammy and lethargically phoned-in.The male actors really don't have a chance against three generations of scenery-chewing harpies, but they try. DeForrest Kelley gets to earnestly deliver some real unintentional howlers (between this and "Night of the Lepus" maybe he should have stuck to the small screen). Mike Connor's plays the nice-guy father/ex-husband--a character who was conspicuously absent in the real-life Turner tragedy. This is not as enjoyable as "Bluebeard" (Heatherton and her sweaters really don't make up for a whole bevy of naked Europe-babes), but if you like unitentional camp look no further.