WHERE LOVE HAS GONE: where-ever it's gone why didn't you take me with you?

The more I see of Susan Hayward the less I like her.
It's getting to the stage now where - when presented with the opportunity to view one of her films - I have to very seriously consider whether I can tolerate sitting through another 90 minutes to 2 hours of her particular brand of acting.
Whoever she's playing, she never fails to fail to convince me that she is that character, rather than just
an actress named Susan Hayward acting out a part particularly unpersuasively.

The real-life Dorian Grey of Hollywood film stars, she always looks the same, her immobile hair never changes, and her character never ages even when, as is the case with WHERE LOVE HAS GONE, the story covers a period of almost 20 years.
Yet despite all this, Susan Hayward is not the worst thing about this film.
That dubious honour belongs to the film itself along with everyone in it and everyone involved in making it.
This bloated, empty vessel, this rancid cinematic cargo of rotting dung spawned from the lurid imagination of Harold Robbins, is so terrible it gives the airport novel genre a bad name.
Hayward plays Valerie Hayden, the world's most unlikely world renowned sculptress. In the studio she's a whizz with a hammer and chisel, and out of it she's a world class nymphomaniac. The former talent is god given, the latter - as the film goes to extraordinarily repetitive lengths to make clear - is the result of a loveless childhood. Her domineering mother, played by Bette Davis, is more concerned with maintaining the Hayden family's good name in San Francisco society, than showing her daughter affection.
The only thing mother and daughter can agree on is Major Luke Miller (Mike Connors). A bona fide World War 2 hero and recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor, Mrs Hayden sees him as perfect husband material, while Valerie's smitten when she witnesses him standing up to her mother. And so he allows himself to be drawn into their spider's web where he soon discovers that fighting the Japs was a walk in the park compared to life with the Haydens.
All of this overheated and unoriginal melodrama plays out in a flashback prompted by their teenage daughter's (Joey Heatherton)  murder of her mother's lover, more than a decade after Valerie divorced her broken and defeated husband.

Supposedly inspired by the real life 1958 killing of film star Lana Turner's gangster boyfriend Johnny Stompanato by her teenage daughter some six years earlier WHERE LOVE HAS GONE lacks even that tawdry event's slender sliver of class. The story's little more than a warmed over assortment of tired and tiresome melodramatic cliches, the script is hysterical ("I love all the wrong people and hate all the right ones!" and "I use sex the way you use alcohol" are just 2 examples) and the cast extremely lacklustre. Davis inserts pauses into her lines in all the wrong places, Connors oozes less charisma than a garden fence, and Heatherton's idea of a 15 year old sexpot is a perpetual pout.
What's perhaps most disappointing is that this film's not even trashy enough to rise to the status of a camp classic. It's only redeeming feature is that it's not three hours long and, really, that's no reason  to invest valuable minutes of your life in watching it. I've done the dirty work so you don't have to.