Cinema: Reel-Life Scandal

Where Love Has Gone. “Somewhere along the line the world has lost all its standards and all its taste,” snaps Bette Davis. But don’t let her dictum fool you. Miss Davis is merely throwing in the opening ball for a few innings of big league smut scraped together from the bestselling novel by Harold Robbins (The Carpetbaggers).

This time, Robbins’ story bears certain unmistakable but less than libelous resemblances to the real-life tragedy of 1958 in which Lana Turner’s teen-age daughter, Cheryl, killed her mother’s lover. Producer Joseph E. Levine has dressed it up as what used to be called “a woman’s picture.” Amidst sumptuous settings, supposedly inhabited by the haut monde of San Francisco, Heroine Susan Hayward plays a world-famous “sculptor, pagan, alley-cat” who detests her domineering mother (Davis), betrays her war-hero husband, unwittingly snares a gigolo with her daughter until one calamitous night when the kid picks up a chisel and . . . What follows is a custody battle, some gamy dialogue, and numerous untidy revelations, none of them very interesting. “With you,” observes one of Susan’s playmates, “art and sex go hand in hand.” Maybe so. But in movies like Where Love Has Gone, they efficiently cancel each other out.