Showing posts with label Elizabeth Taylor. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Elizabeth Taylor. Show all posts

Monday, January 4, 2021

BOOM! 1968

"I don't believe God is dead, but I do think he is inclined to pointless brutalities."
Tennessee Williams

Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton made a total of ten films together (11 if you count the presciently-titled 1973 TV-movie Divorce His/Divorce Hers) over the course of their highly-public, passionate-but-rocky, ten-plus-one-years marriage (wed in 1964, they divorced in ’74, remarried a year later, re-divorced a year after that). By the time they appeared in their 8th vehicle together, Joseph Losey's Boom!, unkind film critics--worn down by years of ceaseless press coverage of the couple's top-of-the-line lifestyle and bottom-of-the-barrel movie resume--had taken to referring to the paparazzi-popular pair as a traveling vaudeville act. A difficult point to argue against at the time.

Branded infamous for their scandalously out-in-the-open, adulterous canoodling during the making of Cleopatra (1963), the combination of gossip and public curiosity helped turn cinematic dogs like 1963s The VIPs (neither had secured divorces from their respective spouses by then) and the following year’s The Sandpiper (their first onscreen pairing as man and wife) into boxoffice blockbusters. Yet it wasn't long after scoring an unexpected critical and boxoffice bullseye in Mike Nichols’ film adaptation of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), that Taylor and Burton developed the reputation for saying yes to any film offer that promised a hefty payday, major tax break, or exotic locale in which to work. 

Il Palazzo di Goforth
Built especially for the film, the mansion of Mrs. Flora Goforth is situated high atop the limestone cliffs of Isola Piana, a small island in the Mediterranean off the coast of Sardinia. Along the bluffs are replicas of the Easter Island moai heads, six of them, representing perhaps the spirits of the six husbands she outlived. Some interiors of the mansion were sets in Rome.


Boom! offered all three, plus the prospect of granting Taylor an unprecedented Tennessee Trifecta: Having already appeared in two successful Tennessee Williams screen adaptations—Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) and Suddenly, Last Summer (1959)—garnering Oscar nominations for both, surely reuniting with Williams for Boom! (working titles Goforth and Sunburst) would result in delivering the third cherry for a boxoffice jackpot. 

In his diaries published in 2012, Richard Burton admitted that The Sandpiper—a substantial financial success, but critical flop—was a film both he and Taylor knew to be a joke, but accepted solely for the opportunity to work together and as a cash-grab of convenience should negative public opinion about Le Scandale lead to their never working again. On the topic of the $5 million mega-flop that was Boom!, Burton asserts that it was a film both he and Taylor very much believed in and very excited to do. In fact, after watching dailies mid-production, Burton writes of the film looking “perverse and interesting, and optimistically intones, “I think we are due for another success, especially E [Elizabeth].” Given the dismal returns on their most recent releases The Comedians (1967) and Doctor Faustus (1967), perhaps the words "long overdue" are more apt.   

Elizabeth Taylor as Flora "Sissy" Goforth

Richard Burton as Christopher Flanders 

Noel Coward as Baron William "Billy" Ridgeway, aka The Witch of Capri 

Joanna Shimkus as Francis "Blackie" Black

Michael Dunn as Rudi

Elizbeth Taylor is eccentric millionairess Flora (“All my close friends call me Sissy”) Goforth. Cloistered away in a majestic mountaintop villa on her private island in the Mediterranean, Sissy Goforth dictates her alternatingly introspective/self-aggrandizing memoirs to her put-upon secretary (Joanna Shimkus) while being overzealously watched by her sadistic bodyguard Rudi (Michael Dunn). It’s summer (isn’t it always in a Tennessee Williams movie?) and Signora Goforth is dying. But not to hear her tell it.

 After burying six husbands--five wealthy industrialists and a penniless poet/adventurer who was the love of her life--the widow Goforth fancies herself as an indefatigable force of nature and nothing less than eternal. And, in point of fact, after getting a load of her constant carping, bellowing, and hurling of coarse invectives at all and sundry, one can well imagine that even death itself, when faced with the prospect of coming face-to-face with Flora Goforth, might opt to pass her by.

In 1968 Boom! and Rosemary's Baby earned the dubious distinction of being the first American feature films approved by the MPAA (Production Code Seal) to feature the word "shit."


"The doctors are disgusted with my good health!” Flora insists. Even in the face of nightly pain injections, blood transfusions, regular vitamin B shots, a steady diet of pills and medications, and the distressing increase in the number of paper roses blooming in all corners of the villa (a paper rose is Flora's bleakly poetic name for the many discarded wads of tissue stained with her coughed-up blood.) 

But for all that money can buy, it can't buy immortality, so the gravely ill Flora Goforth...racing against time to complete her memoirs...is fated to go forth from this plane of existence. But not until she’s good and ready. And ready she’s not. The "dying monster," as she's referred to by her scornful staff, is not yet willing, prepared, or capable of relinquishing her vicelike grip on life. Or, closer to the truth, that which has come to represent life tor her: wealth, power, possessions, position, acquisition, and excess. 

The Walking Dead
By way of her vulgarity, cynicism, lack of compassion, and ostentatious flaunting of wealth,
it's inferred that Flora Goforth's spiritual death occurred long ago.

As though metaphysically summoned, a trespassing stranger named Christopher Flanders (Richard Burton) arrives at the villa carrying two heavy bundles and professing to have been invited. Flanders, whose saintly Christian name proves to be as symbolically relevant (and subtle) as Flora’s surname, is an itinerant poet, mobile artist, aging gigolo, and professional houseguest. Most recently, among his circle of imposed-upon jet-set friends, he has come to be known as “The Angel of Death.” A bitchy-but-accurate name assigned to him after a pattern emerged involving his paying visits to some of his aging and ailing benefactors shortly before their deaths.

With Christopher’s arrival, the already sublimely bizarre Boom! takes on the form of a spiritual allegory played out in a highly-stylized manner suggesting a Western interpretation of Eastern kabuki theater. Flora, facing mortality by stubbornly ignoring its existence, clings ever tighter to what she wants. Meanwhile, Christopher, whose physicality inflames Flora’s lifelong use of sex as a means of denying death, dares to suggest that beyond the things she wants lie the things she actually needs. 

Death Takes a Holiday
Flora amuses herself by dressing Chris (whose clothes were shredded by her attack dogs) as a samurai warrior, but the joke may ultimately be on her. The flowing black kimono and samurai sword present Chris as a kabuki variant of the traditional black-robed Grim Reaper with his scythe.
  


Hostess and guest engage in verbal sparring matches exhibiting the one-upmanship strategizing of games. An element emphasized both in the costuming (Flora & Chris are dressed in the colors of chess pieces) and art direction (chess boards and B&W domino tiles are scattered throughout the villa). Between bouts of seduction and bargaining, their parry and thrust conversations circle around existential fundamentals like acceptance of the inevitable and the relinquishing of the inessential. 
As the sun sets on Flora Goforth's island and indeed, Flora herself, Tennessee Williams’ paradoxically heavy-handed and confoundingly opaque screenplay leaves us with the metaphorical food for thought that “Saint” Christopher has trudged up that mountain to assist Flora in her journey to the other side. And in the recurring device of having Chris' requests for food (especially a drink of milk) met with refusal or completely ignored, the presumed takeaway is that Mrs. Flora Goforth is singularly lacking in the figurative ‘milk of human kindness,’ its train long having ceased pausing at her lonely threshold. 

Flora Goforth, appearing to be engulfed by a stylized golden shroud, is at last ready to go forth. But in reciting the title of the 1963 Broadway play upon which Boom! is based, lets it be known that she...like Helen Lawson...intends on going out the way she came in. 

Such is the tale Tennessee Williams hoped to tell. What he delivered was a wordy, over-stylized exercise in opulent incoherence that, had the cast been a decade younger, would likely have been labeled a youth-culture "head trip" movie. As it stood, the generation still interested in the life-in-a-fishbowl antics of Taylor and Burton were either baffled or bored. It didn't take long for word about Boom! to get around, and, as the saying goes, people stayed away in droves.
Taking advantage of a little breather between Goforth tantrums,
her houseman Etti (Fernando Piazza) and her attending physician Dr. Luilo (Romolo Valli) 


PASSION PROJECT
One of the more persistent Hollywood myths that gains traction every award season is that of the passion project. I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen Oscars triumphantly hoisted overhead as the recipient shares the same “tenacity rewarded” tale of never giving up on a beloved movie vehicle despite years of studio rejection. This then cues everyone watching to shake their heads in amazement at the thought of all those studio dummkopfs failing to recognize the value of a project whose obvious merit now shines so brightly. As reassuring as all this is to those who romanticize the never-say-die spirit, I think it neglects the equally-valuable flip side: recognizing when it is both wise and prudent to let something go. Ironically, one of Boom!’s major themes
Even those who meet Boom! with, as one journalist phrased it "almost gleeful critical contempt" are apt to be impressed by the glorious compositions of Douglas Slocombe's stunning cinematography, and the breathtaking production design and art direction by Richard McDonald and John Clark.


If any Tennessee Williams work can be called a passion project, it’s The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore. How else to explain the alarming fact that Boom!’s screenplay represents Williams’ 4th crack at the same material and he STILL failed to work out bugs?  What began life in 1959 as a short story titled Man Bring This Up Road (a line of dialogue that survives in Boom!) morphed into a stubbornly unsuccessful Broadway play that had the unprecedented honor of bombing twice in the same season. Claiming it to be one of his most obsessively beloved yet most difficult plays to write, The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore is partly 52-year-old Williams confronting his own creative decline (his last hit was 1961's The Night of the Iguana), part his processing of the 1963 death of Frank Merlo, his partner of 14-years, from cancer at age 40.
Flora Goforth's secretary, Mrs. Black--the most honest and compassionate character in the play--owes her name to Williams paying tribute to his love, Frank Merlo. Merlo is the Spanish name for a blackbird, one of which appears in a golden cage in Boom!

In what feels like a desperate, last-ditch effort to get his point across, Williams has a character simply verbalize one of the film's themes: "Sooner or later, a person's obliged to face the meaning of life!" but Joseph Losey's stylized direction works just as hard making sure little as possible makes sense. What comes through (almost in spite of itself) is that death is the ultimate solitary act. No manner how many friends or how much money and "stuff" we amass, we can't take it with us and we must "go forth" alone. Boom! in its clumsy, campy way, proposes the gladdening notion that life offers us final mercy...the appearance of someone (something?) to ease our fear and escort us on our irrevocable journey.  We may claim it was never invited, but death requires no formal invitation. It's been summoned the instant of our birth. 

In his 1975 memoir, Williams relates that he was both astonished and overjoyed when the film rights for The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore had been purchased and director Joseph Losey (The Servant) assigned to the project: “Then a dreadful mistake was made. [Producer Lester] Persky offered the film to the Burtons.”


WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
Were I the gambling type, I’d wager that the very reasons Tennessee Williams saw the Burtons as the least-favorable casting option for Boom! are the very reasons I find them to be absolutely ideal for the material. The stunt-miscasting of Taylor & Burton in Boom! was a bald-faced effort to try and recapture the lightning-in-a-bottle magic of Mike Nichols’ “And you thought she/he was all wrong for the part!” Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?  hat trick, while simultaneously exploiting the screenplay's many Taylor-related bits of self-referential coincidence. Flora was supposed to be a past-her-prime battleax grinding to a halt in her 60s (Taylor was 35), Chris a fading gigolo in his early 30s (Burton was 42). Neither really fit their roles in ways having nothing to do with their ages, but say what you will, Taylor's mesmerizingly purple performance abutted by Burton's Sunday-morning-hangover thesping are the sole and primary reasons Boom! achieves any level of watchability at all.
Chris: (Indicating cigarette) "May I have one?" 
Flora: "Kiss me for it."

But I’m the first to admit that the Boom! I adore is probably not at all the Boom! Losey & Co. set out to make. As a play cloaked in Brechtian minimalism, it reads like a needlessly convoluted rehash of themes Williams has already explored…with more poignance and coherence…in Sweet Bird of Youth, The Fugitive Kind, Summer and Smoke, and The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone. As a film, not only does Williams’ trademark brand of cloaked symbolism and Freudian metaphor sound cobwebby in the era of “tell it like it is,” but no one involved in the project seemed aware that high-minded drama and high glamour have a funny way of canceling each other out. The end result is like watching a Theater of the Absurd sequel to Valley of the Dolls dramatizing the final days of Helen Lawson.

Since Mrs. Goforth on her deathbed looks better than most people in the full bloom of health,
it's kinda hard to wring much pathos out of her plight. 

Representing murky ideologies rather than people, the king-size personalities of Burton and Taylor, left with no characters to inhabit, resort to playing exaggerated versions of themselves. Portraying Death and often looking like it, Burton staggers about while letting his trained voice do all the heavy lifting. Meanwhile, Taylor, tottering around in high heels and even higher hair, plays Flora Goforth as a female impersonator doing a burlesque of Elizabeth Taylor. Yet they’re impossible not to watch. The film's sole concession to a contemporary sensibility is achieved in having a character written as a gossipy queen actually played by one. The Witch of Capri is traditionally played by a woman, and the producers had hoped to snare Katharine Hepburn. But granting the role to famed playwright/composer Noel Coward is inspired if ultimately affectless. 

Losey’s directorial style is languid and lovely and the storytelling clumsy, but there’s no end of delights to be found in the Burtons in their scenes together. Or in the regal blowsiness of Liz and her coughing, barking, swearing, drinking, glowering, and bitching. It entertains and maybe even enthralls.
Despite his initial reservations, Tennessee Williams, feeling his screenplay for the film was much better written than his play, ultimately warmed to Elizabeth Taylor's interpretation of Flora Goforth. Even going so far as to call her performance "The best that she's done." 
Howard Taylor (Elizabeth's older brother, who died in 2020) appears briefly as a journalist 

THE GAWK FACTOR
Before reality TV, the only opportunity fans had of getting a glimpse into the private lives of the rich and famous was when movie stars obliged them by taking on roles audiences were encouraged to interpret as fictionalized versions of themselves. They called it the Gawk Factor. Boom! is a movie loaded with Gawk Factor. The play was written for Tallulah Bankhead, but new generations of viewers are to be forgiven if they assume the role of Flora Goforth was Taylor-made.
Liz Taylor Loves Jewelry
Flora Goforth is a widow who sports a huge diamond ring that (tellingly) cuts into her hand every time someone tries to hold it. It's Taylor's 1956 engagement ring from 3rd husband Mike Todd. Two weeks prior to Boom!'s 1968 premiere, Burton gifted Elizabeth with the famous...and much larger...Krupp Diamond.

Mrs. Goforth has been married six times; Taylor beat that number by one (Burton was husband #5). The one husband Goforth truly loved died in a mountain climbing accident. Mike Todd (whom the fan magazines were fond of claiming was Elizabeth's one true love) died in a mountain plane crash. It's difficult to argue that these fact/fiction similarities weren't exploited, because in the play, Goforth's husband dies in a car crash.   
Liz Taylor Loves To Drink
Enjoying what appears to be a glass bucket of Bloody Mary, Goforth subsists on coffee, cigarettes, codeine tablets, and alcohol. In real life, Taylor suffered from alcohol addiction and helped destigmatize the illness by being one of the first celebrities to go public with her rehab treatment. Boom! is rumored to have been a very liquid set.

Liz Taylor Loves Kaftans
Goforth reveals closets overflowing with colorful kaftans. In the late '60s and '70s (until she found Halston) it was the rare photo that did not feature La Liz in a flowing, colorful kaftan.


Other exploitable Goforth/Taylor parallels pertain to Flora being known for her beauty ("If you have a world-famous figure, why be selfish with it?"), and Flora being plagued by numerous health maladies. Taylor enjoyed poor health throughout much of her life, her paparazzi-attended hospital visits as numerous as red-carpet premieres.

John Waters has called Boom! a “failed art film,” which I think is a very accurate description. It’s just ironic that Boom! ismovie that never could have found financing without the star-system leverage of the Burtons attached, yet the duo's megawatt star-quality is precisely what turns so many scenes in Williams’ elegiac “poem of death” into The Liz & Dick Show
But I don’t really have a problem with that because I think I must be a little in love with Elizabeth Taylor. How else to explain my finding her to be both epically awful and some kind of wonderful in this ambitiously off-beat camp curio that feels more emotionally truthful the older I get?
No, Boom! is not a perfect film, it's possibly not even a good one. But it's a risk-taking film. And the risk-taking Burtons of fascinating flops like this one are infinitely more affecting and fun to watch than the play-it-safe Burtons of moneymaking snooze-fests like The Sandpiper.

What does BOOM mean? It's...



BONUS MATERIAL

Robert Redford portrayed Death as a kind young man who comes to ease an old woman’s (Gladys Cooper) fear of dying in the 1962 episode of The Twilight Zone titled "Nothing in the Dark." 


Divine Intervention
A favorite blogger writes about BOOM! as drag inspiration HERE

That's Tab Hunter embracing Divine in the 1981 John Waters film Polyester. Hunter appeared opposite Tallulah Bankhead in the second Broadway incarnation of The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore. British actress Hermione Baddeley starred in the original production which opened 11-months earlier. 

In 1997 a red-wigged actor Rupert Everett (My Best Friend's Wedding, Another Country) portrayed Flora Goforth to David Foxxe's Witch of Capri in a London production of The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore at the Lyric Theater


Early casting considerations for Joseph Losey's film version (likely never moving past the discussion stage) were Simone Signoret and Sean Connery; Ingrid Bergman and James Fox. Donald Sutherland was wanted for the role of bodyguard Rudi.

BOOM! opened on Wednesday, May 29, 1968 at Hollywood's Pantages Theater. 



Copyright © Ken Anderson   2009 - 2021

Tuesday, April 26, 2016

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'sAfraid 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

Thursday, March 31, 2016

NOT WITH A BANG, BUT A WHIMPER: A List of Lamentable Last Films

“This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper.”   - T.S. Eliot   

It can’t be easy maintaining a film career. The practical side of the motion picture business doesn’t readily correspond with an artist's desire to work well and consistently while trying to hold onto whatever faint vestiges of integrity and self-respect are left intact after one is deemed no longer young or the pop-culture “flavor of the month.” Fans, critics, and rear-view-mirror biographers tend to speak of an actor’s career and body of work as though they are things strategically orchestrated and mapped out. Perhaps in some cases this is true, but for the most part, the cold realities of the business of fame suggests an actor’s lingering legacy is often the result of nothing more premeditated than the serendipitous meeting of talent, luck, ambition, and tenacity.

A film career of any length is bound to have its ups and downs, but if an actor is lucky, the ups outnumber (or outweigh) the bad to sufficient degree as to have little impact on time’s overall evaluation of an actor's merits. Because Hollywood films ween us on happy endings and tidy conclusions, perhaps this breeds in us an expectation (or hope) that the careers of our favorite stars culminate in films and performances worthy and emblematic of their lifetime achievements, in toto.

Occasionally it works out: as in John Wayne, dying of cancer in real-life, portraying an aging gunman dying of cancer in his last film The Shootist (1976); or Sammy Davis Jr. appearing as a revered, aging tap-dancer in Tap (1989) his final film. But all too often stars with illustrious early careers bow out in vehicles severely at odds with their cumulative talent, reputations, and dignity.
So here's a list of the less-than-celebrated last films of a few of my favorite actors. An unlucky list of 13 movies - indicative of nothing deeper than a movie fan's wish that these talented stars had been shown to better advantage in their final movie roles.
   
1. Mae West — Last Film: Sextette (1978)
The final film of screen legend Mae West turned out to be something of a good news/bad news affair. The good news being that the self-enchanted octogenarian ended her four-decade movie career in a name-above-the title star vehicle (vanity project) designed as a tribute to her image and career. The bad news, of course, is that I’m referring to Sextette: an ill-advised, fan-produced exercise in celebrity exploitation so unflattering to its leading lady, it essentially ends up being a 90-minute exercise in character assassination and idol-smashing...set to a disco beat.
Shoulda Quit While I Was Ahead: My Little Chickadee (1940) 
*****

2. Laurence Harvey  — Last Film: Welcome to Arrow Beach (1974)
Speaking in terms of equal opportunity, it’s nice to know that late-career leading men are as susceptible to the beckoning charms of the B-grade horror film as the cadre of older actresses populating that subgenre known as Grand Dame Guignol. On the heels of appearing with gal pal Joanna Pettet in a 1972 episode of TVs Night Gallery, and co-starring with longtime friend Elizabeth Taylor in Night Watch (1973); Oscar nominee Laurence Harvey (Room at the Top - 1959) went the full  slasher route in the rarely-seen cheapie Welcome to Arrow Beach. Appearing again with (VERY) good friend Joanna Pettet, Harvey underplays a military vet with a cannibalistic taste for hitchhiking hippie chicks and blowsy booze hounds. Looking gaunt from the stomach cancer that would claim his life before this film was released, Harvey also directed this bloody exploitationer which rode a short-lived 70s trend of cannibalism-themed horror movies. I remember seeing this as a teen (under the alternate title, Tender Flesh) on a double bill with the another  cannibal horror film, The Folks at Red Wolf Inn (1972). I guess we all have our low moments.  View trailer HERE
Shoulda Quit While I Was Ahead: Night Watch (1973)
                                                                         *****

3. Joan Crawford — Last Film: Trog (1970)
As a journalist once noted, the boon and bane of every Crawford fan has always been the actress’s dogged professionalism. No matter how low she'd fallen (and Trog is about as low as it gets) Crawford always emoted as though Louis B. Mayer were still breathing down her neck. Crawford’s co-star in Trog is a professional wrestler in a rubbery Halloween mask (Joe Cornelius), but by the level of her intensity and commitment, you’d think she was acting opposite Franhcot Tone. And while this trait is certainly admirable, it has the unfortunate effect of making Joan appear to be performing in a vacuum; acting her ass off independent of the tone and timbre of the scene, not really relating to her co-stars. In Trog, Joan – looking tiny and occasionally pretty well-oiled – plays an anthropologist who attempts to tame a "Kill-crazy fiend from hell!” amidst public outcry and resistance. As always, Joan is the best thing in it (on my personal Camp-o-meter, anyway), but this B-horror movie programmer is so beneath her talents it makes the schlock she made for William Castle look dignified.
Shoulda Quit While I Was Ahead: Berserk (1967)
*****

4. Gene Kelly — Last Film: Xanadu (1980)
A curious inclusion given how much I love this film and how, considering what he had to work with, I actually think Gene Kelly acquits himself rather nicely.
But I have to admit I've always found my enjoyment of Kelly in this musical to be running neck and neck with a sense of missed opportunities and a disappointment in how poorly he’s served by this charming but rather weak vehicle as a whole. Xanadu is nothing if not respectful of the influential actor/singer/dancer/director/choreographer who helped shape the face of the modern movie musical; it’s just that he’s let down by an insipid script, sabotaged by editing and camerawork which fails to understand the rhythms of dance (or rollerskating...they cut off his feet!), and is left to play third-fiddle to two low-wattage leads who fail to possess even a fraction of his screen charisma. So while Xanadu is not exactly a career embarrassment (I'd say that honor goes to his direction of Hello, Dolly! & The Guide for the Married Man), it ranks as a poor representation and send-off for the genius that was Gene Kelly.
Shoulda Quit  While I Was Ahead: The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967)
*****

5. Gloria Swanson — Last Film: Airport ’75 (1974)     
In this loopy sequel (of sorts) to 1970’s Airport, silent screen star Gloria Swanson appears as herself and makes up for all those mute years by never shutting up. Swanson’s not onscreen a great deal ‒ although it feels like it since, in a film overrun with nuns (Helen Reddy, for one), Swanson makes the curious choice of dressing exactly like a nun who’s been to a couturier ‒ but when she is onscreen you can bet she’s talking about herself. Ostensibly under the guise of dictating her memoirs to her self-medicating secretary (Planet of the Apes’ Linda Harrison or Augusta Summerland, who knows a thing or two about keeping quiet), Swanson, who is said to have written her own dialog, captures perfectly what it’s like to be in the company of an actor: they are always their own favorite topic of discussion.
Overlooking the suspense-killing casting of having Swanson playing herself in a fictional narrative (what are they gonna do, have her get sucked out a window?), her role feels like a far-in-advance infomercial for her 1980 memoir Swanson on Swanson. A title describing the entire thrust of Swanson's self-enamored characterization here.
Shoulda Quit While I Was Ahead: Sunset Blvd. (1950)
*****

6. Dean Martin / Frank Sinatra — Last Film: Cannonball Run II (1984)
Although I tend to consider myself a child of the '60s & '70s, and therefore lay no claim to the cinema atrocities committed in the 80s; the next time I go on a jeremiad about the craptastic bros-before-hos movie oeuvre of Adam Sandler and Kevin James, someone needs to remind me that Burt Reynolds – an actor from my generation – pretty much originated the lazy buddy comedy genre. That's when you find someone to pay for you and your pals to get together and have a good time, hand somebody a camera, film it, slap a title on it, and then call it a movie.
I never saw the original The Cannonball Run (1981) but the appeal of having the '60s Rat Pack reunited onscreen in this movie (Sinatra, Martin, Sammy Davis Jr. & Shirley MacLaine all appear) got the better me, and so I watched it one night on cable TV. With this movie (and I use the term loosely) I discovered that nostalgia is no match for a film that clearly holds its audience in low regard. The level of contempt this movie has for the intelligence of its audience is palpable and pungent. Dean Martin dares you to call him on the obvious fact that he really doesn’t give a shit, and Frank Sinatra looks exactly like someone dutifully following through on a favor/obligation. Dreadful. An unspeakably depressing last film for two of my favorites.    
Shoulda Quit While I Was Ahead: Airport (1970) / The First Deadly Sin (1980)
*****

7. Elizabeth Taylor  — Last Film: The Flintstones  (1994)    
Beyond the garden-variety complaint that Hollywood never seems to know how to properly showcase stars once they cease to be young, I’ve no objection to an actress of Elizabeth Taylor’s magnitude and reputation being cast as Fred Flintstone’s harridan of a mother-in-law (one Pearl Slaghoople) in a live-action version of the enduring 60s primetime TV cartoon show (inspired by the live-action The Honeymooners). Indeed, given Taylor’s sense of humor about herself, lack of pretension, and past success in playing shrews and shrill, fishwife types, it’s actually a pretty cool idea.
My problem lies with how dismal a comedy The Flintstones turned out to be. Taylor's role is little more than an extended walk-on, but in it, she's saddled with some strenuously unfunny material that she doesn't handle particularly well. There's so little to The Flintstones beyond the wittily prehistoric costumes, sets, and special effects (it's all concept, no content), that one is left with too much time to contemplate why the only laughs the film earns derive from how accurately the production team has captured some device or creature recognizable from the cartoon. Taylor (sporting that awful Jose Eber feathered helmet hairdo she adopted at the time) has definitely been better, was capable of better, and I only wish she had been given better.
Shoulda Quit While I Was Ahead: The Mirror Crack’d (1980)
*****

8. Peter Sellers — Last Film: The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu (1980)
It’s anybody’s guess how this flat, misguided comedy ever got beyond the planning stages, but avarice likely played a role in this unsuitable-for-release trainwreck ever seeing the light of day (it was released weeks after Sellers’ death). Fandom fuels a desire to see the last professional efforts of any favored celebrity, but it’s hard to imagine any Peter Sellers fan deriving much joy from this slogging crime comedy. A film which also served as the last screen role for Mary Poppins’ David Tomlinson and features Helen Mirren impersonating Queen Mary, the grandmother of Queen Elizabeth II, whom Mirren would win an Oscar portraying 26-years later. Sellers was a comic genius who made a career out of disappearing behind impersonation, but by the '80s his extended yellowface Fu Manchu shtick was strictly cringe material. Matters aren’t helped much by Sellers (ill at the time) playing dual roles: bored & tired.
Shoulda Quit While I Was Ahead: Being There (1979)
*****

9. Tallulah Bankhead —  Last Film: Die! Die! My Darling!  (1965) 
This one’s a bit of an academic call. A call resting both on the awareness of Tallulah Bankhead being an esteemed stage actress whose motion picture appearances were rare (thus branding this Z-grade exercise in Hag Horror as a film far beneath her talents); and the full understanding that no one in their right mind would care to deprive the world of Bankhead’s mesmerizingly over-the-top performance in said Psycho-Biddy gothic. Bankhead is too fine an actor for a title like Die! Die! My Darling! to stand as the representative coda to her brief film career, but as a longstanding connoisseur of camp, I can’t deny that I’m forever grateful to her for having undertaken it.
Shoulda Quit While I Was Ahead: A Royal Scandal (1945)
*****

10. Bette Davis — Last Film: Wicked Stepmother (1989) 
It’s kind of a good thing this chaotic comedy about a homewrecking witch (Davis) is so aggressively unfunny, for the sight of the frail, reed-thin, surgically tightened, post-stroke, eerily animatronic Bette Davis croaking out her lines while chain-smoking like a madwoman is a bonafide laugh-killer. A problem-plagued production that had the ailing, dissatisfied Davis deserting the film shortly after shooting began (resulting in her onscreen time amounting to slightly less than 15-minutes), Wicked Stepmother may have brought Davis a hefty paycheck and yet another opportunity to work – something obviously very important to her – but beyond the curiosity value of seeing one of Hollywood's greats in her last film roe, the whole affair has a ghoulish feel to it.
The only joke in the film that works is a brief sight gag revealing the late wife of Davis' new husband (Lionel Stander) was Joan Crawford.
Shoulda Quit While I Was Ahead: The Whales of August (1987)
*****


11. Charles Boyer — Last Film: A Matter of Time  (1976)
Charles Boyer is an interesting case. He dodged having to be shackled with Ross Hunter’s Lost Horizon (1973) as his last film by following up that misstep with the stylish Alan Resnais film Stavisky…; a fine and suitably distinguished movie to end his career. Unfortunately, Boyer dodged the Ross Hunter bullet only to jump into the firing line of Vincente Minnelli’s calamitous A Matter of Time (1976). A film which not only reunited Boyer with the director of two of his earlier films (The Cobweb and The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse), but reunited him with his Arch of Triumph and Gaslight co-star, Ingrid Bergman.
Hopes couldn’t have been higher when it was announced Vincente Minnelli (making his first film since 1970s On a Clear Day You Can See Forever) was going to direct daughter Liza (in need of a hit after Lucky Lady) in a lavish costume drama. Without going into the ugly details behind a problem-plagued production, suffice it to say A Matter of Time didn’t do anybody’s resumés any favors. Boyer, as the husband of dotty Contessa Bergman, is really rather good. It’s the film that’s such a mess.
Shoulda Quit While I Was Ahead: Stavisky…(1974)
*****

12. Lucille Ball — Last Film: Mame (1974)  
Mame was released with a ton of hoopla and cheery smiles all around, but once the smoke cleared (and a few years had passed) what were we left with? A star who claimed making the film “was about as much fun as watching your house burn down”; a costar (Bea Arthur) who went on record stating, “It was a tremendous embarrassment. I’m so sorry I did it,” and that the leading lady was “terribly miscast”; a discontented composer (Jerry Herman); and a marriage dissolved (according to Arthur, her husband – Gene Saks, Mame’s director – used emotional blackmail to get her to do the movie: “As my wife you owe it to me to play this part.”).
Mame was to be TV legend Lucille Ball’s return to the silver screen, but reviews and reception to the film were so harsh, this $12-million misstep was her swan song. Oops! Maybe it’s not polite to bring up singing in this context.
Shoulda Quit While I Was Ahead: The Long Long Trailer (1953)
*****

13. Barbara Stanwyck — Last Film: The Night Walker (1964) 
After playing a bordello madam (Walk on the Wild Side) and appearing in an Elvis Presley movie (Roustabout), I guess Barbara Stanwyck decided to make her career degradation complete by working for William Castle. The Night Walker is a somewhat listless, surprisingly gimmick-free William Castle melodrama that, while not doing much for Stanwyck, at least reunited her with former hubby and co-star Robert Taylor.
As always, Stanwyck and her trademark intensity are fascinating to watch and the only worthwhile elements in a film that really would have been just fine as an episode of one of those suspense anthology TV programs (although the really creepy music by Vic Mizzy is effective as hell).
Happily, with the movies treating her so shabbily, it's nice to know television provided Stanwyck with some of her finest latter-career moments (I'm crazy about her performance in The Thorn Birds).
Shoulda Quit While I Was Ahead: Walk on the Wild Side (1962)

"I am big! It's the pictures that got small."
Norma Desmond - Sunset Blvd.

Copyright © Ken Anderson