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Twelve reasons to watch Portrait in Black

• It’s now available on a DVD double-bill with Madame X, and trust me: Ricardo Montalban and Constance Bennett are worth the price of admission.

• Lana Turner’s gowns–by Jean Louis, natch.

• Lana Turner’s husband (played by an exceedingly tan Lloyd Nolan), who lasts for about the first ten minutes of the film. He’s totally evil–you can tell because he strokes a Siamese cat!

• Lana Turner’s face as she watches her late husband’s business partner pushed over a cliff. It’s like Diana Ross in the car scene in Mahogany, but way better. Lana eats her own fists! No gag reflex!

• The shady chauffeur played by Ray Walston (aka everyone’s favorite Martian). He’s as gay as Dr. Smith–whom he resembles strikingly at times. Did anyone ever see those two together? Scandal!

• Tawny, the maid, as played by Anna May Wong in her final big-screen appearance. (From where I sit, she looks an awful lot like Ann Miller in Mulholland Drive. Or maybe it’s Ann Miller who looks a lot like her.) I’m guessing Anna’s fatal heart attack one year later had something to do with all the lead paint in the scenery, ’cause girlfriend chews it to a pulp.

• Anna May’s leitmotif, which is olde skoole, Chinese restaurant background musak: an orchestral fortune cookie that says, “This lady’s Asian!”

• Lana Turner’s son, played by an actor made entirely of ham.

• Sandra Dee–who plays Lana Turner’s daughter one mo’ time–escaping Lana’s crazed lover in the middle of the night by climbing onto a third-story ledge overlooking San Francisco bay.

• The aforementioned crazed lover (Anthony Quinn) following Sandy onto the aforementioned ledge, and, because he’s a murderer having extramarital sex in 1960, subsequently plummeting to his death as a boneless dummy.

• The clunkiest Edsel of a plot ever. Like noir, but in Technicolor. Seriously: when the Big Twist is revealed, you’re all like, “Whaaaaat?” Telenovas ain’t got nothing on this shit.

• A entire cast of characters you wanna slice and dice. Remember in Place in the Sun how Shelley Winters is so fucking annoying you can’t wait for Montgomery Clift to shove her out of the canoe? It’s like that. But for everyone in the cast. They’re all just faaaaabulously awful.