Lana Turner Blog-a-Thon.

The ones who could tell us all about Lana Turner and what she meant to her once wildly enthusiastic fan base are a dwindling lot of world war veterans - the men who served and worshipped Lana, and the women who crowded her movies stateside and lived vicariously through her romances, both onscreen and off. It's easy for our generation to regard her as a studio manufactured joke, for we never experienced the anxieties that a star like Lana was there to alleviate. She was comfort food with a brief shelf life, but like strawberries fresh from the market, she had an intoxicating flavor that just can't be experienced so many years after the initial purchase, and a movie like Marriage is a Private Affair can give but the barest hint of what it must have been like to taste Lana in her prime.

Flickhead: "Her thick-lipped, doe-eyed carnality carried the baby fat voluptuousness of Bernadette Peters, but one doubts Lana possessed the self-assurance to comprehend and arrest the caricature and self-parody that lay at her disposal."

The Self-Styled Siren: "As much as the Siren wants to believe in universal sisterhood, there is no denying that dazzling beauty can make a woman off-putting to her own sex. But from the beginning Lana didn't arouse that kind of hostility from other women, instead suggesting the sort of goddess who would still be kind to the ugly duckling. Women liked her."

Michael Guillen: "Even as a teenager my prurience was piqued by Lana's voluptuous body in compromised situations, tethered by middle class ethics, chafed by small town gossip, in love and ravaged by men she shouldn't be in love with, irresistible, a femme fatale, an unwilling adulteress with desires beyond her control. Little did I know that Lana Turner's personal life was no less dramatic than her roles on screen."

Richard Gibson proposes a "dream double bill": Imitation of Life and The Merchant of Four Seasons.

Stillettos and Sneakers: "Being told most of her life as a child that she was 'fat' and 'funny looking,' her love affair with the camera was strained at best in the beginning. She had this in common with her early classmates on the MGM lot: both Elizabeth Taylor and Judy Garland."

Peter Nellhaus: "Of the many films starring Lana Turner, The Sea Chase is atypical, but it is representative of the state of her career at the time."

For That Little Round-Headed Boy, Somewhere I'll Find You is "an unheralded classic, even more so when you take into account the sad, real-life tragedy underneath it." Even so, it's also "fun, flirty and compulsively watchable." Take note, too, of his P.S.

Nice pix at Agence eureka.

Posted by dwhudson at July 2, 2006 3:47 PM