“Portrait in Black” is another of Ross Hunter’s inglorious attempts to showcase the only remaining exploitable bent Lana Turner had left—sleazing her way through histrionic sexcapades. In her previous Hunter melodrama “Imitation of Life,” Lana pretended to be both mother to Sandra Dee and theatre star hoping to nab the leading role in a faux Fellini picture. But her sticky blonde globs and booblessness were overshadowed once Susan Kohler started to pass herself off as white, was beaten up by Troy Donahue and then suffered the most extravagantly humiliating sobbing ever by a daughter at her mother’s funeral. There’s nothing comparable in “Portrait” but there are lesser pluses: Lana on occasion looks healthy in a Claire Trevor sort of way, gets amusingly slammed by her soon-to-air-bubbled-in-the-heart husband Lloyd Nolan when he tells her that she needs “a vitamin shot for love deficiency”; fends off Richard Basehart’s advances and fireplace iron assault; drives for the very first time (after getting her driver’s permit) a finned-up chromed-to-the-max Chrysler at night in a downpour on California’s Highway 1 without knowing which button to push to use the windshield wipers; and earns a mighty slap for her confederate efforts by lover Anthony Quinn. “Portrait” is a flimsy redo of “The Postman Always Rings Twice,” allowing Lana to survive the original crash to duplicate all those sins of the damned. Hardly a moment when we didn’t fight the gag reflexes of her mother love in “Imitation,” but as extra here she’s insincere stepmother to Dee and it’s minor fun watching the stepchild scrutinize. (Still, when Dee comes into Quinn’s sights as the next victim, we’re not too sure if she should be saved.) The miscasting of Quinn as a husband murderer is too conspicuous; inference rules that his tall greasy darkishness is Johnny Stompanato camouflaged as a doctor smitten by the insanity Lana’s alleged bewitchment causes in men. If her 1940s ripeness might have pardoned Garfield’s lunacy, it’s those original oil paintings on the walls of Quinn’s pad that are much more likely the culprits for his homicidal tendencies and terrible performance. Though the abominations are provided a screen credit for the Martin Lowitz Gallery, the artists are not; the anonymity is the smartest move made in this enjoyably rattlebrained movie.
