THE GO-BETWEEN 1971

"You flew too near the sun; you were scorched."

Spoiler Alert. This is a critical essay, not a review, so plot points are revealed for discussion

Gee, I can’t imagine why one of my most beloved and cherished films from the early 1970s is a movie about a sheltered and naïve adolescent boy who becomes hopelessly infatuated with Julie Christie.

Well, perhaps I can.

To anyone who knows me, it’s hardly a secret, and indeed, has become something of an overbelabored point, that I have been ga-ga over Julie Christie since I was a pre-teen...way back in the days when The Beatles were still together.  

What started out for me at eleven years old as a mere crush after seeing Julie Christie on screen for the first time in Far from the Madding Crowd (1967) has only grown more adulatory and devoted over the years. My admiration for Christie's talent and twitterpated adulation of her beauty found echoed justification with each successive film. 

The face that stared out at me from our living room coffee table

Though (paradoxically) I think Julie Christie tends to shine most brilliantly in period films, it has always been her distinctly contemporary quality that most defined her appeal to me. Combining a direct, emotional honesty with assured intelligence, wit, sexual independence, and self-possession, Julie Christie seemed to me the very embodiment of the modern image of woman in film. An image updated and of a very different stripe than the Hollywood leading ladies I grew up watching.

Looking back, it's quite a sobering thing to reflect that I’ve been absolutely, unabatedly besotted with Julie Christie for more than half a century.

And The Go-Between is all about reflecting.

By beating out Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice for the Grand Prize at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival, The Go-Between’s win represented a distinct personal-rivalry victory for director Joseph Losey. But the prestigious Palme d’Or ultimately failed to work its magic at the American boxoffice or hold much sway with Academy voters, for the film was largely a critical success and received only the scantest Oscar attention (a Best Supporting Actress nod for Margaret Laighton was the film’s sole Oscar nod). 

I saw The Go-Between in 1972, when I was 14, and recall being surprised—what with the above-the-title Christie and Bates paired for the first time since Madding Crowd—that the film’s focus was not on its adult characters, but on the experiences of a boy very nearly my age. And though nothing about the story’s timeline and setting (England, 1900) suggested I should encounter anything even remotely relevant to me, my life, or limited frame of experience, I was thrilled to discover just how much the film truly resonated with me personally.

I don't recall ever before having the experience of feeling that I both understood and could relate to the inner nature of a character whose life, while nothing like my own, nevertheless held several canny and "I thought I was the only one who felt that way!" parallels… parallels far and beyond the whole “adolescent crush on the exquisite Julie Christie” angle.

Julie Christie as Marian Maudsley

Alan Bates as Ted Burgess

Dominic Guard as Lionel "Leo" Colston

Margaret Leighton as Mrs. Madeleine Maudsley

Edward Fox as Viscount Hugh Trimingham

Michael Gough as Mr. Maudsley

The Go-Between is a picturesque and commendably faithful adaptation of the 1953 novel by L. P. Hartley (author of The Hireling). Directed by Joseph Losey (Secret Ceremony, Boom!) from a literate script by playwright Harold Pinter, The Go-Between marks the duo’s third and final collaboration, following their synergistic partnership on the films The Servant (1963) and Accident (1967). 

The titular Go-Between of the story is Lionel “Leo” Colston (Dominic Guard), a sensitive, earnestly sincere 12-year-old of a somewhat dreamy nature that all-too-easily—and injuriously—lends itself to a kind of emotional fragility and flights of superstitious fancy. Out of a need to feel he has some power over his life—his father recently died, his mother’s finances are strained, and he’s bullied at school—Leo places great stock in the determining forces of the Zodiac, half-convincing himself that he has the power to levy magical curses.

Marcus Maudsley (Richard Gibson) introduces an anxious Leo to Brandham Hall.
Their modes of dress highlight the stark differences (among them, class and the
 unearned self-assurance of wealth) between the schoolmates

The course of Leo’s life changes irrevocably when he accepts an invitation from a wealthy classmate to spend a sweltering summer at the latter's family’s baronial country estate, Brandham Hall—a sprawling, Gosford Park-ish affair that, by the looks of it, takes up a sizable chunk of Norfolk, England. There, Leo, an outsider unversed in the caste-specific rules and obligations of the upper classes, becomes the unwitting and naively complicit facilitator in a scandalously illicit affair between the aristocratically betrothed Marian (Julie Christie) and Ted, a working-class tenant farmer (Alan Bates), when he’s elected as the covert couple’s letter-carrying liaison.

Leo is so dazzled, he's blinded.

Set in the Edwardian Era and told from Leo’s fish-out-of-water perspective, The Go-Between is most manifestly a turn-of-the-century coming-of-age story that offers a trenchant indictment of the rigid, suppressive constraints of the British class system. But through Pinter’s insertion of brief, melancholy flashforwards to the late 1950s—wherein we encounter Leo as a sad-eyed adult (Michael Redgrave) and learn that what we’re watching are his memories of that fateful summer—it becomes clear that The Go-Between is also a reckoning-with-the-past story.

Michael Redgrave as the adult Leo Colston

Thanks to Gosford Park, Downton Abbey, The Gilded Age, and, most significantly, the Merchant-Ivory films, period costume dramas are now as familiar to American audiences as the Western.

But back in the early ‘70s, they were still something of a rarified genre, typically coming in one of two varieties: mouldily old-fashioned Oscar-bait (Nicholas and Alexandra -1970, Ryan’s Daughter - 1970) or highbrow deconstructivist (The Garden of the Finzi-Continis -1970, Death in Venice -1971).

The Go-Between most determinedly qualifies as the latter. In their thematically exacting adaptation of Hartley’s often misunderstood novel, Losey and Pinter use the temporal beauty of a meticulously recreated, period-romantic world to beguile the viewer (as it does Leo) before pulling the Victorian rug out from under us, revealing the dappled gentility of The Go-Between to be mere window dressing masking a tale of lacerating emotional brutality and psychological trauma rivaling anything in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?  or They Shoot Horses, Don't They?

That Noise You Hear Is the Sound of Illusions Shattering
Reality inevitably intrudes upon Leo's blinkered idealization of Marian and Ted  

1970s cinema distinguished itself as the age of disenchantment, unhappy endings, and antiheroes, making The Go-Between—a tale without heroes, set in a world full of hypocrisy, class elitism, and the callous manipulation of the vulnerable by the wealthy—a perfect Nixon-era zeitgeist piece.

Moral ambivalence is also a characteristic of '70s cinema

Lacking a male figure in his life, Leo responds to the paternal kindness of the two very different men in love with Marian—Ted, whom she loves but cannot wed, and Hugh, to whom she's obliged to wed, but does not love. Leo is faced with a moral dilemma when his go-between duties come into conflict with his conscience. 

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

What I love about this film? Well, Julie Christie, of course — as commanding a screen presence as ever — in a role that finds her once again finding the humanity in a superficial character and leveraging her sirenic beauty with chilling assurance. The word "chilling" points to one of the top reasons The Go-Between captured my imagination as a youth, and why it has remained a film I never tire of revisiting. 

With its dark subtext and its setting used as a dominant, active participant in the narrative, watching The Go-Between is like watching a Gothic fairy tale (a Sunshine Gothic, if such a thing exists). 

Against a backdrop of bright daylight, frilly frocks, and posh British accents, Leo, like Wonderland’s Alice and Oz’s Dorothy, is introduced as an innocent transported to an unfamiliar world where his adventures lead to a harsh moral education, resulting in a devastating psychological reckoning/loss of innocence. 

Michel Legrand’s lushly romantic, subtly ominous score for The Go-Between (replacing composer Richard Rodney Bennett) contributes invaluably to the film's mounting sense of dread. With each new lie told, each risk endeavored, and each confidence unstably guarded, Legrand's melodramatic piano motif drives home the tense certainty that none of this can end well.

The Go Between is the 2nd of four films that
Alan Bates and Julie Christie would make together

And speaking of tense...one aspect of the film's psychological tension that registered more acutely in the film than in the novel is the way in which The Go-Between plays with the viewer's alliances. Initially, Marian and Ted, as lovers thwarted by the draconian inanities of classism, are the objects of sympathy. But with the introduction of Hugh, someone we expect to be the problematic "other guy," but who is, in actuality, a decent, likable, and quite dashing fellow, the lovebirds' actions come off as deceitful and cruel. 

Looming large over Leo in this shot are the two differing
ideals of masculine identity that Hugh and Ted represent  

Then there's social-climbing Mrs. Maudsley, who, though ceaselessly shooting daggers of distrust at her daughter, is nevertheless all hospitality and egalitarian graces when it comes to lower-class Leo. So... despite my empathizing with the difficult position he has been placed in, during a scene where Leo engages in an ill-masked deception, telling a bald-faced lie to the woman who had heretofore only shown him kindness, my heart went out to Mrs. Maudsley. 

From the novel: 

Leo - “I saw how green I must have looked to her and how easy to take advantage.”  

It's Not Easy Being Green

The gift of a Lincoln green summer suit (from Lincoln, England, the shade associated with Robin Hood)—an act of kindness that endears Marian to Leo and engenders his loyalty—comes to take on the hue of something tarnished when Leo learns from his friend: “It’s green [referring to a bike Miriam intends to give Leo on his birthday...to help him deliver messages faster] Bright green. And you know why? Because you are green yourself. It’s your true color. Marian said so herself.”

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Cinematographer Gerry Fisher (Secret Ceremony, Fedora) imbues The Go-Between with a studied romanticism that reinforces the film’s picturesque setting while shoring up its darker psychological themes. The film's visual texture, designed to transport the viewer to a time and place distant and alien from the present—making tangible the novel’s famous opening line, “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there”—also establishes the film's narrative perspective; we’re seeing this world through Leo’s eyes.  

Glowingly honey-colored and sun-dappled at the start (the tale is set, significantly, at the turn of the century…Leo’s innocence standing in for pre-war England’s optimism), the film grows incrementally gloomier (radiant sunshine giving way to torrential rainstorms) in coincident conveyance of Leo’s disenchantment and loss of innocence.  

Leo checks the mercury thermometer daily, believing that, though
the power of his will, he can induce the summer heat to rise 

The concepts of fate and destiny are poignant, cross-purpose leitmotifs in The Go-Between. Fate's neutral dominance and intractability are symbolized by nature, while destiny manifests as the misdirected efforts of characters who believe (fallaciously) that they have control over the outcome of events. 

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

As an adolescent, I felt isolated as a middle-class Black kid in white-majority neighborhoods and schools; lonely because, despite having four sisters, I lacked someone to talk to; shy, which became my survival skill as a gay teenager; and lacking a male guidance figure since my mom had recently remarried, making my stepfather still somewhat of a stranger. I also had an inner life that felt more authentic to me than my outer reality. 

Movies became my refuge, escape, and discovery. 

I approached The Go-Between seeking escape, but instead, discovered a white, British, fin de siècle version of myself reflected back at me. In a Norfolk suit, no less. 

Leo's Monumentally Unlucky 13th Birthday

Scenes depicting Leo’s outsider’s awareness of being “in” Brandham Hall but not “of” Brandham Hall reminded me of every I'm-the-only-Black-person-in-the-room experience I had growing up. Just as my being a child of the H-bomb-anxiety '60s (the root of all those fantasy TV sitcoms of the day: My Favorite Martian, Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie) made me relate to the coping mechanism comfort Leo finds in the quick-fix, wish-fulfillment belief in possessing magic powers.

Have To Believe We Are Magic
Until I saw this movie, I didn't know that the desire for magical powers is a common fantasy in children. I once failed to study for an upcoming test at school and wished-wished-wished to get sick overnight so I could stay home. No such luck. But when I got to school the next day, the TEACHER was sick, and we had a sub...and no test!!
At the time, you could not have convinced me it wasn't all my doing. 

As I was an internal, self-serious kind of kid, I particularly identified with Leo's idealization of adults. With me, it manifested in a tendency towards being crush-prone whenever any grown-up paid me the slightest bit of attention (in grade school, I fell in love with a teacher who happened to look just like Sally Kellerman, simply because she asked for my help rolling the film strip projector cart back to the AV room).

A scene that’s always intrigued me is the one where all the Brandham Hall boys are off swimming, and Leo, who doesn't know how, is off to the side, sneaking a peek at Ted, who is sunbathing in the nude. The scene is ambiguous, leaving the viewer free to interpret, on Leo’s part, either a natural curiosity about a stranger (he and Ted have not yet met) who is relaxed and comfortable in himself, or an equally natural adolescent sexual curiosity. Being that I’ve always been of the mind that Alan Bates could arouse sexual curiosity in a rock, I saw it as the latter, projecting another point of identification with the character of Leo.

It's a perception that felt, if not “correct,” then perhaps validated when, in later years, after finally reading The Go-Between, I learned that author L.P. Hartley was gay and based his book on a summer he spent at an estate in Norfolk called Bradenham Hall when he was sixteen. It seemed Hartley only publicly acknowledged his sexual identity came late in life, and in 1971, published The Harness Room, his only gay-themed novel. 

PERFORMANCES

OK, what can I say about La Christie that I haven't already covered in the NINE essays already posted about her films?  Julie Christie is marvelous in The Go-Between, and of her performance I contend that if it can be said she possesses a niche gift, it's her peerless ability to inhabit and humanize (without trying to make them likable) characters who are blithely cruel. (Christy's Kitty Baldy from 1983's The Return of the Soldier [with Alan Bates] is like Marian Maudsley...the later years.)

18-year-old Dominic Guard in Picnic at Hanging Rock -1975

The Go-Between is a reminder of what a tremendous impact a well-cast leading child's role can have on a film (the young actors in 1972's The Other and that TV version of The Shining ruined both movies for me). Dominic Guard is perfection...simply because his natural, unaffected reactions feel as nascent as everything about Leo and his sense of self. Contrasted with the young actor who plays Leo in the 2015 BBC-One adaptation of The Go-Between: the kid is excellent...but he's acting the hell out of the part, and I was never unaware of that fact. 

The Go-Between, as realized by Joseph Losey and Harold Pinter, is for me a near-perfect screen adaptation of Hartley's heartbreaking novel, capturing both the beauty and the brutality of the story.

Of course, it isn't lost on me that my revisit to this movie some 54 years after my first experience of it, fittingly parallels the film's flashforward sequences that have adult Leo returning to "the scene of the crime" of the death of his innocence.

Happily, that's where the parallels end, for when I look at this 1971 masterpiece now, I feel more keenly than ever its humanist soul. The world that my 68-year-old eyes look out at today seems in a race to make a virtue of what is most weak in us (our capacity for cruelty) while turning the only true strength humans have (our compassion) into a liability.

The Go-Between is like a cautionary tale, reminding me of the damage that's inflicted by oppressive social structures, and what's at stake for humanity when we forget that we really should handle one another with a great deal more care. 

Clip from "The Go-Between" (1971)

BONUS MATERIAL

May December (2023)

Michel Legrand's mesmerizing score for The Go-Between was used to evocatively melodramatic effect when it was reorchestrated and adapted by composer Marcelo Zarvos for the Todd Haynes film May December, starring Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore.

The Go-Between (2015)

Randy old sod that I am, the only improvement I could find in the faithful, perfectly serviceable TV adaptation of The Go-Between is that it grants us several Leo 's-eye-view shots of Ted Burgess (Ben Batt) in the altogether. Broadcast in September 2015, this version features Vanessa Redgrave and Jim Broadbent as old Marian and old Leo, respectively.

The Go-Between opened in San Francisco on Wednesday, October 13, 1971  

Copyright © Ken Anderson     2009 - 2025

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 8^th 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’ 4^th 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! is a movie 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...

A taste of "Boom!"  1968

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