X, Y & ZEE 1972

Warning: Spoiler Alert. This is a critical essay, not a review, so plot points are revealed for the purpose of discussion.

She's at that awkward age. Seventies-era Elizabeth Taylor, that is. Starting out as an uncommonly pretty child actress, Taylor grew into a breathtakingly beautiful movie star who became known (with the assistance of Eddie Fisher, Richard Burton, and "le scandale") as a world-class homewrecker and tabloid darling. Over time came the respect and legitimacy of two Academy Award wins (Butterfield 8, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?), too soon supplanted by the undesired notoriety of being the star of several costly, eccentric flops. Come the '70s, Taylor seemed to settle into a kind of teetering-on-the-edge-of-irrelevance fame that cast her as the walking embodiment of movie star excess. A symbol of fishbowl-celebrity victimization and the near-obsessive object of keyhole journalism. She was a public figure noted more for her jewels, illnesses, and fluctuating waistline than for her talent as an actress.

Elizabeth Taylor as Zee Blakeley

Michael Caine as Robert Blakeley

Susannah York as Stella 

I was 15 in 1972, and had you asked me then to name an actress, I would have said Glenda Jackson, Jane Fonda, or Faye Dunaway. If you'd asked me to name a movie star, in a heartbeat, I'd have said Elizabeth Taylor. She was in a different category altogether. Why? Certainly not because I was so familiar with her work. No, at age fifteen, I had only seen Taylor in a couple of movies on The Late Late Show, and on the big screen, only Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Secret Ceremony. The reason Elizabeth Taylor represented and defined movie stardom for me was that, for as long as I could remember and as far back as memory served, there had not been a single month in the entirety of my childhood that didn't find Elizabeth Taylor's face gracing the cover of a magazine, newspaper, or scandal-sheet. She was famous to me before I even knew what famous was.

But by 1972, Elizabeth Taylor had become an in-betweener. An eminent member of old-guard Hollywood too young to be nostalgically "hip" like Alexis Smith and Ruby Keeler (both of whom enjoyed brief career resurgences on Broadway in 1971: Follies and No, No Nanette, respectively); too big a star to go the put-out-to-pasture, weekly TV series route taken by Henry Fonda, Jimmy Stewart, and Shirley MacLaine (all starring in short-lived TV shows during the 1971-1972 season); and yet too old to be taken seriously in the "New Hollywood" which cast her  (preposterously) as a mini-skirted Las Vegas showgirl(!) carrying on an affair with 5-years-younger Warren Beatty in The Only Game in Town (1970). 

Granted far too little screen time (but making the most of it in a see-through frock),
the fabulous Margaret Leighton plays a party-giving socialite named Gladys.
She could be the prototype for Ab Fab's Patsy

One of Taylor's most significant drawbacks was that she still looked like a movie star in an era that had turned its attention to gritty naturalism and actors who looked like regular folks. In a time when roles were written for people who looked like Karen Black, Elliot Gould, and Dustin Hoffman, Elizabeth Taylor stood out for all the wrong reasons. A de-glamorized Taylor tended to look matronly (something both her fans and detractors never let her forget). Yet at the same time, an in-step-with-the-times Taylor (she was only 38 when X, Y & Zee began filming) came across like a trying-too-hard fashion trainwreck (something evident in most every frame of X, Y & Zee).

Seventies youth-oriented fashions were unique in that they seemed to come with built-in lie-detectors; they invariably made those who sought to appropriate the look of the "now" generation look infinitely older, not younger. Elizabeth Taylor's short stature and curvy figure (so fetching in the hourglass silhouettes of the '50s and '60s) was ill-served by the bright colors and form-fitting cut of mod clothes and hippie chic. When she wasn't looking like a Technicolor butterfly in blowsy caftans and height-reducing ponchos, she was encased and cocooned in trendy synthetics that appeared as uncomfortable as they were unflattering. 

As for her film career: the all-encompassing scope of Taylor's tabloid notoriety, a spate of ill-advised self-referential movie roles (audiences treated every Taylor/Burton film pairing as a dramatized glimpse into the couple's real life), and stunt-like TV guest appearances (in the daytime soap All My Children and on Lucille Ball's sitcom Here's Lucy—both in 1970), all conspired to make it next to impossible for audiences to accept her in a movie as anybody but herself.

What was a contemporary cinema demi-goddess to do?

Well, one solution – especially if one was as in need of a hit as Taylor at the time—was to give 'em what they wanted. And to a large degree, that's precisely what X, Y & Zee does. Author Edna O'Brien's original screenplay about a toxic romantic triangle among London's tony set (originally titled Zee & Co.) is an acerbic black comedy-drama that appears to have been whittled and shaped to suit the talents and persona of its star. (O'Brien contends that as many as four writers tinkered with her script...even changing her original ending - reportedly involving a ménage à trois - to a lesbian conquest.)

Elizabeth Taylor portrays Zee Blakeley, the coarse, overdressed vulgarian wife of shout-talk architect Robert Blakeley (Michael Caine). Theirs is a sophisticated open marriage. A decidedly rocky one, however, sustained by constant bickering, wicked parry and thrust verbal matches, and relentless game-playing of the sexual one-upmanship sort. This dysfunctional breakup-to-makeup cycle is disrupted when Robert meets and instantly falls in love with the serene Stella (the lovely Susannah York sporting the most astoundingly-constructed 70s shag), a widowed dress designer with twin boys and a fashion boutique named...appropriately enough...Kaftan.

As the younger "other woman" who has caught both Robert's eye and exceedingly fickle heart, Stella exudes such intelligence and sensitivity that it's rather difficult to understand what she sees in the lizard-eyed lothario...beyond, perhaps, the flattery of the ardency of his pursuit. As for Robert, it's clear Stella represents an opportunity for a little peace and quiet, and a little less fashion eye-strain.

"I think she looks like a bag of bones."
Zee and best friend Gordon (John Standing) size up the competition

I can only speculate that what ensues was initially intended to be a three-pronged war of wills in which everyone's desires are ultimately revealed to be selfish and motivated by rescue, dependency, or escape. However, what is actually served up is a one-woman battle and full-on frontal assault waged by Zee against Robert and Stella (both hopelessly outmatched) as she resorts to every trick in the book—and a few no one had yet dared think of—to keep her man and assure that things remain as they are.

Screenwriter O'Brien may have exhausted the whole "modern marriage under stress" topic in 1969's more dramatically satisfying Three Into Two Won't Go (in which Rod Steiger's uncooked pastry dough countenance strains credibility as the fought-over commodity in a romantic triangle featuring real-life wife Claire Bloom, and Judy Geeson). A similar tone of sophisticated cynicism and candor is strived for in X, Y & Zee, but only the occasional spark note is ever actually hit. No problem, for Taylor & Co. seem content to coast on personality and fireworks, capitalizing on and exploiting every ounce of the script's self-referential humor and second-hand Albee melodrama.

The result: Elizabeth Taylor's Zee, balancing on the brink of self-parody and frequently leaping headlong into camp, is less a character than a burlesque amalgam of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? 's Martha; Leonora, the scatterbrained chatterbox from Reflections in a Golden Eye; the claws-out Maggie from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; and snatch-and-grab bits culled from years of Taylor's press clippings.

Taylor makes knowing, self-aware jokes about her weight-

 Zee: "Real men don't like skinny women. They only think they do because they're supposed to look better in clothes. But what happens when the clothes come off, and you climb between the sheets on a cold winter night? Then they like to know they're with a real woman."

Taylor turns well-known critical barbs into self-directed comedy-
Robert: "She (Stella) suggests you open a fish store."

Taylor indulges her well-documented bawdy sense of humor-
Zee: "Frankly, Scarlett, I don't give a shit!"

Taylor reprises Maggie the Cat-

Zee: (On the phone to Stella) "Is my husband in your skinny, chicken-like arms?"

Taylor reprises Virginia Woolf's Martha- 

Zee: "Come back here, you! I haven't dismissed you yet!"

And, of course, with each scene of Taylor and Caine whaling on and wailing at one another between bouts of heated make-up sex, the tumultuous real-life Taylor/Burton union (which had about two more years to go) is evoked, and (the audience hopes) reenacted.

Taylor, while balancing an enormous mane of Medusa hair, drowning in a fashion parade of gaudy, sail-like caftans, and risking violet eye-shadow poisoning, gives a performance that is by turns unsubtle, nuanced, hilarious, knowing, touching, and assured 

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

I imagine that the mental calisthenics a writer must perform in order to come up with something new to say about the romantic triangle are considerable. Edna O'Brien's tack seems to be to examine what binds people together in an atmosphere of unbridled license. The Beautiful People populating X, Y & Zee are a rarefied set. Unlike the penniless, free-love hippies espousing freedom and "doing your own thing" in the atmosphere of the sexual revolution, the hedonistic individuals at the center of the film have both the wealth and autonomy to be truly free. And therein lies the problem.

Without the need to be tethered or tied to anyone, the whole idea of marriage and morality becomes confoundingly fluid. No one can be accused of cheating because cheating first presumes the existence of rules. And from what little we glean from this couple's past (Zee can't have children and pets die on them with tragic regularity), like Albee's George and Martha, game-playing replaced rules for Zee and Robert long ago.

The introduction of Stella into the middle of this duo is significant. Stella, unlike Zee, is a working woman, and Robert, a self-made man, is wealthy but proud of his humble beginnings. Stella—calm in the face of Zee's excitability, soft-spoken to Zee's shrillness—also wears around her neck a Quran case amulet (an Islamic protective talisman which plays an important but subtle role in the film's conclusion) suggesting a spirituality and connection to something outside of herself…another attribute lacking in Zee. Add to this the fact that Stella also has two children with whom Robert immediately develops a rapport, and we come to understand why Zee recognizes in Stella, no ordinary rival.

Both Susannah York and Michael Caine give noteworthy performances

This is the core conflict in X, Y & Zee, and while not earth-shatteringly profound stuff, it makes for compelling human drama and (in the film's quieter moments) is exceptionally well-played by the cast

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Alas, quiet moments in X, Y & Zee are pretty hard to come by. As directed by Brian G. Hutton (Night Watch) X, Y & Zee is a crudely funny, visually flashy, magnificently photographed, and exceedingly noisy movie. Perhaps in an effort to better fashion O'Brien's 3-character story into a star vehicle, X, Y & Zee not only tells the story from Zee's perspective (which I can understand), but allows Zee's aesthetics (loud music, loud clothing, and shrieking whenever possible) to become the film's defining motif. 

I'm aware that the '70s presents its own unique challenges if one's intention is to depict a character as vulgar and coarse, and it's a great deal of campy fun having Elizabeth Taylor run full-throttle diva roughshod over every and all; but it does tend to unbalance the narrative, making it difficult for the dramatic sequences to hit their stride. As a huge fan of Mike Nichols' poorly-received 2004 comedy-drama Closer (about two sets of couples endlessly circling one another), I think X, Y & Zee could have benefited from a similarly deft balancing of the serio with the comic.

PERFORMANCES

As stated in previous posts, my respect for and appreciation of Elizabeth Taylor was rather late in coming, making me wonder what I would have made of  X, Y & Zee had I seen it when it was released to theaters in January of 1972. Because it plays so strongly to what I once thought were her weaknesses (her voice, her sometimes too-knowing camp appeal) I don't think I would have rated it very highly. 

Today is a different story. Maybe it's my own age (I'm 20 years older than Taylor in this film), maybe it's nostalgia for the era (the '70's never looked more Austin Powers-like), and most definitely it's the dawning awareness that her like is nowhere to be found on movie screens today; but I think Taylor is damn good in this movie. As funny as she is in the first part (a broad performance not likely to win over detractors) she truly shines and is quite moving in the second half. I've seen X, Y and Zee several times, and while I find it to be uneven (I can understand Edna O'Brien's dissatisfaction with the script) I can't deny that I have - to quote the poster - an absolute ball watching it. 

In Richard Burton's published diary, he wrote of how there was a genuine belief on his part that X, Y and Zee would be the much-needed boxoffice hit for Elizabeth. Alas, it proved to be just the latest in a lengthening string of underperforming films that came to characterize her latter-day career. Taylor never stopped being a star, but she never again rose to the heights of her '60s film popularity. 

I especially like Susannah York. Her character doesn't entirely make sense to me, but York's performance is so natural and seems to come from a place of clear understanding on her part, I feel I'm always struggling to get up to speed. She draws me into her character in search of what I'm positive I'm missing. The scenes between Taylor and York are my favorites. The hospital scene being a real standout...both are just tremendously affecting together. In the buddy-film atmosphere of the '70s, not many big female stars were cast opposite other women, and I forever bemoan what was potentially lost in not having any women's films comparable to the pairings of Redford and Newman.

X, Y and Zee's meta credentials don't stop with allusions to Taylor's previous roles as overbearing shrews. Susannah York's casting (her part was said to have first been offered to Julie Christie) harkens back to her controversial role in 1968s The Killing of Sister George

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Couldn't sign off on X, Y and Zee without commenting on two non-Elizabeth Taylor-related favorite things about the film. One is the luminous cinematography of Billy Williams (Women in Love, Night Watch). Maybe it's the pristine quality of the DVD, but I never noticed before how burnished everything (and everyone) looks. The garish '70s decor and fashions pop off the screen creating a glitzy world of numbing sensual overkill.

X, Y and Zee goes for every "sophisticated" and "adult" credit it can get by having two featured gay characters. Michael Cashman is Gavin, an employee at Stella's shop. Cashman, whose character Zee mordantly describes as a "poncy little fag" is, in real life, currently a member of British Parliament and the Labour Party's special envoy on LGBT issues worldwide. So shove it, Zee!  

Second is the film's musical theme, the eloquent ballad "Going in Circles" by Ted Myers & Jaianada. The lovely lyrical version played under the film's opening credits sets the tone for a movie that doesn't arrive until about 45 minutes in. And a terrific vocal version is heard over the closing credits, but the singer's identity is hard to reliably confirm. 

Internet sources cite Three Dog Night, but they recorded a cover version on an album that sounds nothing like the one in the film. Another source claims the vocalist is Richard (Harry) Podolor, the manager of Three Dog Night. Further confusing the issue, a friend who claims to have seen the film when it was initially released says that Three Dog Night sang over the closing credits originally, but when the film came to VHS and DVD they replaced their version (copyright issues?) with the one we now hear (who that is I still don't know). In any event, it's a graceful song and curiously ideal for this not-very well-regarded little film that has become one of my favorite Elizabeth Taylor vehicles.

Zee: "He loves his little games. Do you play?"

Stella: "I'm afraid I don't."

Zee: "Nor do I."

BONUS MATERIAL

As a possible solution to the above quandary, I found this online poster image containing a sticker promoting Three Dog Night singing "Going in Circles" in the film. (click on poster to enlarge)

One of my favorite Elizabeth Taylor clips: Taylor presenting at the 1981 Tony Awards. She's really adorable and infectiously hilarious.

Copyright © Ken Anderson   2009 - 2016