Cinema: A Terrible Place to Visit

• Share

Love Has Many Faces. "This town is a can of worms," says Cliff Robertson, describing the moral pollution of Acapulco. Love makes Mexico's coastal resort look like a terrible place to visit and no fun to live in either, for the beaches are littered with disreputable Americans. One of them is dead—a suicidal beach boy named Billy, who has obviously taken the easy way out of a flabby, overdressed melodrama.

The still-wriggling survivors include Robertson, himself a former beach bum now employed full time as the husband of Heiress Lana Turner. Having discarded poor Billy along with last season's swimming suit, Lana naturally feels a smidgen of guilt. Billy's prim fiancee (Stefanie Powers) takes it rather hard too. She arrives from Detroit in very low spirits, but soon slips into something more comfortable, persuaded by Cliff that thinking up answers for a lively lover easily beats asking questions about a defunct beau.

Meanwhile, several unsavory friends stand ready to expand a mere triangle into a many-splendored thing. Lana's warmest admirer is Hugh O'Brian, a Romeo-for-hire to rich female tourists. Two of them (Ruth Roman and Virginia Grey) have come to Acapulco to get some son, and Ruth thinks that O'Brian is just the buy.

As star of the picture, of course, it is Lana who suffers most. And at 44, Actress Turner looks precisely like a girl whose million-dollar assets have been frittered away on gaudy clothes and dime-novel escapades. So she goes out to a friend's hacienda, dolls up in traditional tienta costume, falls off her horse and gets gored by a young bull. Moments after they rush her to the hospital, her marriage is saved. Only Love is lost, but probably no one will notice.