Butterfield 8 (1960)

Butterfield 8 is a more interesting movie than its reputation would suggest. It was made at a transitional moment for Hollywood. During the 50s the process of undermining the Production Code had begun. Otto Preminger had shown that the Production Code Authority could be defied. He made a couple of movies that were refused a Production Code Seal of Approval but they were released commercially anyway and did well at the Box Office. By 1960 the Production Code was showing clearly visible cracks.

At the same time the major studios were tentatively exploring the radical idea of making grown-up movies for grown-ups. They were even starting to get interested in making movies that dealt with sex honestly and openly. In 1960 The World of Suzie Wong dealt with an American businessman who falls in love with a Chinese prostitute. In 1961 Breakfast at Tiffany’s was a major hit and although it is not openly stated in the film it is blindingly obvious that Holly Golightly is an expensive high-class call girl. Butterfield 8 was part of the same wave of Hollywood movies about sex.

Butterfield 8 is a steamy sex melodrama about a beautiful socialite, Gloria Wandrous (Elizabeth Taylor), who has slept with so many men that she describes herself as the biggest slut of all time. Her latest conquest is Weston Liggett (Laurence Harvey) but this time it’s different. He’s the first man she’s slept with and then fallen in love with. Which would be a wonderful thing except that he’s married. And his wife Emily (Dina Merrill) is growing tired of his relentless pursuit of skirt.

There’s another man in Gloria’s life. Steve Carpenter (Eddie Fisher) is a childhood friend but it’s obvious to everyone (except possibly to Gloria) that Steve is hopelessly in love with her. It’s certainly obvious to Steve’s fiancée Norma (Susan Oliver).

Gloria has decided that Weston Liggett is the one man she wants and she intends to get him. She intends to have him all to herself.

This is obviously likely to end messily.

By the standards of 1960 Butterfield 8 is very open about sex. In the opening scene Gloria wakes up in bed naked and reaches out for the man she expects to find next to her, and that man is another woman’s husband. Remember that in the heyday of the Production Code married couples were not supposed to sleep in the same bed. Shortly afterwards we see Gloria and Liggett arrive at a motel in the middle of the day. For contemporary audiences a movie that made it absolutely crystal clear that a woman is having sex with another woman’s husband would have been pretty startling.

What makes this transitional phase in Hollywood history interesting is that Hollywood was still not quite sure how to handle such a story. Under the Production Code Gloria would have to severely punished for her sexual sins. The favoured way of dealing with such a situation was to have the woman redeemed by a noble self-sacrificing death. In 1960 the studios were not sure whether to continue to play safe and have the wicked woman die for her sins or whether to allow her to find happiness. They just weren’t sure which way to jump. For obvious reasons I’m not going to tell you which way this film jumps.

Butterfield 8 was at the time widely dismissed as a trashy movie based on a trashy novel. It has never quite been able to escape that reputation.

One of the problems is that Butterfield 8 really is trashy. It’s an overheated sweaty sex melodrama. I happen to like overheated sweaty sex melodramas. Butterfield 8 reminds me just a little of Valley of the Dolls - it’s a movie that takes itself too seriously and ends up veering into camp territory. Butterfield 8 is nowhere near as camp as Valley of the Dolls but it does have that slight tendency. It has a lot of overblown moments, and a lot of pompous dialogue. On the plus side there are some delightfully catty exchanges between Gloria and Norma.

One thing we have to confront is the question of what Gloria actually does. While movies like Breakfast at Tiffany’s skirted around the prostitution question Butterfield 8 seems to go to great lengths to persuade us that Gloria isn’t a prostitute. But there are things about the plot and about the motivations of the characters that don’t make sense if she’s not a prostitute. It’s just possible that she inhabits the ambiguous world of mistresses who are in practice courtesans. But the whole telephone thing certainly suggests that she’s a call girl.

If there’s an underlying theme to this movie it’s people being dishonest with others and with themselves about sex, and rushing to make judgments on others and on themselves about sex. Liggett loves Gloria but he won’t leave his wife for her because his wife Emily is the sort of virtuous woman that you marry whereas he considers Gloria to be a slut. Gloria’s friend Steve Carpenter genuinely cares about her and is sexually obsessed with her but he also considers her to be the kind of Bad Girl that men don’t marry. He also considers her to be a slut. And she considers herself to be a slut or a whore or both.

Gloria’s mother manages at one and the same time to think that her daughter is a slut and a virgin who is saving herself for marriage. She cannot accept the truth that Gloria has sex with men and enjoys it.

It’s interesting that Gloria doesn’t really feel guilty about having sex with a married man. What she feels guilty and ashamed about is the fact that she enjoys sex.

Elizabeth Taylor won the Best Actress Oscar for this film (a film she hated) and there’s some controversy about that as well. There was a widely held belief that it was a “making amends” Oscar, that she only won the award because the Academy belatedly realised they should have given her the Oscar for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. There’s no question that she deserved an Oscar for that film but personally I think she won for Butterfield 8 because she gave a damned good performance. Whether the movie itself was worthy of her is another matter.

What can be said is that Miss Taylor really does steam up the screen. At this stage of her career she positively oozed sex. Fortunately that’s exactly what this rôle calls for and she goes all out.

And then there’s the matter of her co-star. Laurence Harvey is an actor a lot of people love tp hate. He routine gets described as wooden or dull. Personally I think that’s because the absurd histrionics of Method Acting were all the rage at the time. Harvey was a real actor and he gave subtle believable performances. He’s an actor I admire quite a bit but I have to admit that there are many who disagree with me.

I don’t think Butterfield 8 has had a Blu-Ray release but the Warner Home Video DVD offers an excellent anamorphic transfer.

Butterfield 8 isn’t a great movie but it’s a lot more interesting that it seems to be on the surface. For that reason it’s recommended.

The Girl Who Had Everything (1953)

While it’s been described as a rather loose remake of the pre-code classic A Free Soul it’s probably better to regard MGM’s 1953 The Girl Who Had Everything as a completely different film.

Elizabeth Taylor had made the transition from child star to adult star in spectacular style in 1951’s A Place in the Sun. Her subsequent movies for MGM were a bit of a mixed bag and The Girl Who Had Everything is certainly not a high point in her career. At the same time it’s nowhere near as bad as its reputation would have you believe.

It’s also notable for being William Powell’s final movie at the studio, and in fact one of his last movies.



Powell is Steve Latimer, a very successful lawyer who is not unduly troubled by a conscience. He treats his profession as a bit of a game; in fact that’s how he treats life in general. He is happy to defend gangsters - it’s all part of the sport. So he has no ethical objections to representing gambling czar Victor Raimondi (Fernando Lamas) before a senate inquiry into gambling and organised crime.

Latimer is a widower who has raised his daughter Jean (Elizabeth Taylor) to approach life in much the same manner. They both pride themselves on being free spirits who regard society’s rules with a certain amount of scorn.



And now the chickens are coming home to roost for Steve Latimer. He’s about to discover that perhaps this was not the ideal way to raise a child. Jean has become infatuated with Victor Raimondi. He’s good-looking and he is even more contemptuous of society’s rules than the Latimers. He’s a handsome sexy bad boy and Jean wants him. And she means to have him.

Now Steve Latimer will find out that when you’ve taught your daughter to make her own decisions she’s likely to do just that, even when those decisions are clearly going to have disastrous consequences. And Jean will find that dating a mobster isn’t always as much fun as she thought it would be.



When Steve discovers that Jean and Raimondi are lovers and that they intend to get married he decides the time has come to take drastic action. He resolves to destroy Victor Raimondi before Raimondi destroys his daughter. Of course destroying a gangster who has never had any qualms about committing murder is liable to be a dangerous undertaking.

Fernando Lamas is adequate as Raimondi. Gig Young plays Jean’s very respectable former boyfriend but is given very little to do. William Powell was 61 but the charisma and the charm are still there and he’s extremely good. The 21-year-old Taylor is in complete control and could already play this sort of role with effortless ease.



This is by no means a great movie but Powell and Taylor give it a touch of class. It has the feel of a B-movie with A-movie stars.

It’s hampered to some extent by the Production Code but it still manages to make it clear that Jean and Raimondi are sleeping together. It’s the father-daughter relationship that is the key, and the conflict between being a free spirit and being a responsible adult. Both Steve and Jean have to learn to grow up, fast. The movie handles this reasonably well.



Adequate entertainment, worth seeing for the performances of William Powell and Elizabeth Taylor, and for the opportunity of seeing Taylor at her most breathtakingly beautiful (and wearing some truly stunning clothes).

The Sandpiper (1965)

In the 1960s Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton were the world’s most famous celebrity lovers, their stormy private life threatening to overshadow their reputations as actors. They made numerous movies together, most of which were regarded with a certain amount of scorn by critics. The Sandpiper, made in 1965, has a particularly poor reputation.

Elizabeth Taylor plays Laura Reynolds, a slightly eccentric unmarried bohemian artist raising her son Danny in a beach house in California. The son keeps getting into trouble, largely because she has raised him to regard rules and laws with contempt. Finally she is offered a stark choice - he can either be sent to reform school, or he can be sent to San Simeon School. This is an exclusive and very traditional Episcopalian boarding school, run by the eminently respectable Reverend Dr Edward Hewitt (Richard Burton).

Laura considers any kind of school to be a kind of prison but an Simeon at least sounds marginally preferable to reform school. The local judge pulls some strings to get the boy accepted and to have his tuition fees paid.



Danny finds San Simeon to be much less awful than he expected. In fact he quite likes it. Dr Hewitt takes his duties as headmaster very seriously and feels he needs to get to know Danny’s mother better. Purely for professional reasons of course. The fact that Danny’s mother is a ravishingly beautiful free spirit who does a spot of nude modeling for local bohemian artists has nothing to do with the interest that Dr Hewitt takes in her. At least that’s what he tells himself, and for a while he even believes it. Of course it isn’t very long before they end up sleeping together.

Dr Hewitt is a happily married man, or at least he was until Laura came along. Now he comes to question everything about his life. He and his wife Claire (Eva Marie Saint) had started out with such fine ambitions to live a Christian life and to dedicate themselves to the cause of educating the young but over the years they have learnt to compromise. Dr Hewitt has learnt how to ingratiate himself with the wealthy in order to get more money for his school. Now he feels he has found something pure and fine and noble. Although his wife is more inclined to think he’s just found a younger and sexier woman.



Now Dr Hewitt and Laura have to decide where their lives are going.

The plot is of course laughable. There are countless cringe-inducing moments (many provided by Charles Bronson as a bohemian artist). The whole bohemian proto-hippie free-love free-spirit thing is embarrassing. Much of the dialogue is outrageously over-ripe. This could easily have been a major cinematic train wreck. But despite its egregious faults it’s actually rather entertaining. The biggest mistake you can make with material like this is to try to approach it with subtlety. Luckily there’s no danger of Burton and Taylor making that mistake. Nor is there any danger that director Vincente Minnelli will make such an error - he had a real flair for melodrama and wasn’t the slightest bit afraid of going over-the-top. This is after all the guy who directed The Bad and the Beautiful and Two Weeks in Another Town. In some ways he’s an ideal director for a slice of Burrton-Taylor excess.



Minnelli is also a man who knows how to make attractive movies and he makes the most of the California locations.

I always get excited by movies featuring Richard Burton as a man of the cloth (movies like Night of the Iguana). Preachers tortured by lust were a bit of a Burton specialty. Taylor is delightfully camp. Laura is a total airhead but she’s a great deal of fun to watch. Poor Eva Marie Saint is left with the totally thankless role of the devoted and faithful wife and there’s really not much she can do with it.

The early 60s was a fascinating and neglected period of movie history. The Production Code was clearly becoming untenable and the studios were consciously trying to make more adult-oriented movies. The Sandpiper is one of the many movies of that period that tried to take a sophisticated modern approach to sex while still being careful not to go too far.



At the same time it was an era when Hollywood was trying to make big pictures and the combination of these two tendencies resulted in some strange but outrageously entertaining movies.

It’s probably fair to say that in order to enjoy The Sandpiper you have to be a fan of Burton and Taylor and you have to have a bit of a taste for 60s camp but if you do fall into those categories you should find plenty to enjoy here.

I saw this one on cable TV but it is available on DVD.

A Place in the Sun (1951)

George Stevens’ 1951 A Place in the Sun leaves me with mixed feelings, but then I always seem to have mixed feelings about his movies.

It was based on Theodore Dreiser's 1925 novel An American Tragedy. Thankfully the movie drops much of the social commentary and concentrates instead on a personal drama. If there’s one thing that invariably has me reaching for the eject button it’s Hollywood movies that attempt social or political commentary. Apart from the tedium they tend to date very badly.

Montgomery Clift plays George Eastman, the son of poor but honest Christian mission workers. They belong to the poor but noble and hardworking branch of the Eastman family. As distinct from the rich but wicked and frivolous branch of the family. After his father’s death young George sets off to make his fortune. He pays a call on his wealthy uncle who controls the Eastman business empire. The uncle offers him a job at the mill, starting at the bottom but with at least a hint that if he does well he might well soon start progressing up the corporate ladder.

He befriends the plain but good-hearted Alice (Shelley Winters), starts an affair with her and gets her pregnant. By this time though the doors have started to open for him, even if at this stage they’re only open a crack. A promotion is soon in the offing and he is invited to socialise with the rich Eastmans and their friends. And he meets Angela Vickers (Elizabeth Taylor). It’s love at first sight for both of them. The rich folk are still suspicious of the uneducated and awkward poor relation but George is ambitious and is confident those doors will soon open wide. But what to do about his now unwanted working-class girlfriend?

Being a George Stevens movie the pacing can most charitably be described as leisurely. It could be described uncharitably as glacial. It looks wonderful though. Stevens was a meticulous and painstaking director and visually this methodology pays off. The movie has a feeling of rather stately grandeur to it. Stevens makes effective use of what was at the time an innovative approach to close-ups, especially in the love scenes between Taylor and Clift.

Stevens made two very bold casting choices. The first was Shelley Winters in the role of Alice. Winters at this time was still cultivating a glamour girl blonde-bombshell image but she was starting to hunger for meaty roles and she was prepared to shed the glamour to get them. And she wanted this particular role very badly. She does a splendid job.

The second bold piece was casting was picking Elizabeth Taylor as the female lead. Taylor was just 17 and this was her first really serious acting role and her first real adult role. As she herself says in the accompanying documentary, up to this time her leading men had been dogs and horses. It was a spectacularly successful piece of casting. Taylor’s mastery of her craft even at this tender age is awe-inspiring. She had the advantage of having never had an acting lesson in her life. She learnt by doing, and she learnt very fast indeed. She is by far the best thing about this movie.

Now we come to the movie’s biggest problem - Montgomery Clift as George Eastman. It was a highly influential performance, in fact one of the performances that really put Method Acting on the map. It’s a performance that has been praised to the skies. But it doesn’t work. Clift is much too distant. OK, he’s an alienated outsider, I get that, but he’s a dull and uninteresting alienated outsider. His tragedy fails to be compelling because the character is too blank, too stupid and too vicious. I couldn’t have cared less what happened to George Eastman. And one is never quite sure whether Clift is trying to emote or is simply suffering from indigestion.

Of course alienated outsiders were incredibly fashionable in the 50s (even more fashionable if they were inarticulate alienated outsiders) so the movie was adored by the critics.

So we have a movie that is mostly worth seeing because this is where the Elizabeth Taylor legend starts. Other than that it’s a bit of a hard slog.

The Region 4 DVD is packed with extras, the highlight undoubtedly being Taylor’s personal reminiscences about the making of the film.

Zee and Co. (1972)

Zee and Co. (released in the US as X, Y and Zee) comes from what I think of as the classic high camp phase of Elizabeth Taylor’s career. In this period she made a series of outrageous movies such as Boom! and Secret Ceremony, movies that were generally regarded with disdain by critics.

Personally I adore them, and Zee and Co. fits in perfectly with the over-the-top hysteria that characterised these movies.

Elizabeth Taylor is Zee, married to architect Robert Blakeley (Michael Caine). Their marriage is stormy and unconventional, and it’s about to get even more turbulent when Robert catches sight of Stella (Susannah York) at a party. He’s instantly attracted to her, something that doesn’t fail to attract the notice of Zee. Not that she minds all that much if Robert sleeps with Stella. They’ve both obviously had quite a few affairs on the side, and just as obviously they make no attempt whatsoever to be secretive about their extramarital dalliances. But Zee senses (correctly) that this has the potential to be more than just an affair. Robert can have sex with other women if he wants to, but falling in love with them is definitely not acceptable.

And falling in love is exactly what Robert and Stella proceed to do. Zee reacts in what appears to be her normal way - with bitchiness gradually escalating to hysteria. Poor Stella is quite out of her depth. When Zee discovers that Stella has a deep dark secret hidden in her past (a lesbian passion for one of the nuns at her school) she closes in for the kill.

Elizabeth Taylor dominates the movie, as she dominated every movie se ever made. She’s gloriously excessive and wickedly funny. She projects an overwhelming sexuality and an even more overwhelming emotional neediness, and although she pushes her characterisation almost to the point of grotesqueness she remains glamorous in an extravagantly sleazy way.

Michael Caine is equally good. He plays Robert as a man who’d like to think of himself as cool and always in control but underneath he’s as much out of control as Zee is. His outbursts of violent rage are frightening in their intensity.

Susannah York is always in danger of being overwhelmed by the bravura performances of the other two leads but she’s also very impressive in a much more subtle way. The interplay between these three characters is explosive.

In its day this movie was considered pretty risque (at least by the standards of mainstream major-studio releases), mainly because of the lesbian overtones.

This is very much a movie for lovers of camp, and for Elizabeth Taylor fans. If (like me) you fit into both those categories you’ll have a wonderful time with it. If you don’t fit into either category you’ll probably be left wondering what the hell the makers of this picture were thinking. Personally I loved it.

The Region 2 DVD looks terrific. I believe it’s also been released in the new series of Columbia DVD-Rs.

Raintree County (1957)

Raintree County is a movie that very few people have a good word for. For many it represents everything that was wrong with Hollywood in the 50s, being overlong, overblown, over-produced and and overloaded with stars. Personally I think it’s a surprisingly interesting film.

Its main claim to fame (or infamy) is of course the fact that Montgomery Clift had his near-fatal car accident during the filming.

It is 1859 and a group of young people are celebrating their graduation from the local academy in a small town in Indiana. Raintree County takes its name from a local legend about a mysterious raintree. Many have searched for the raintree but none have found it. But then it’s one of those things you’re not supposed to find; the search is what matters.

John Shawnessy (Montgomery Clift) and Nell Gaither (Eva Marie Saint) are close friends and there seem to be an unspoken assumption that in the fullness of time they will marry. John does have a rival for her affections, in the form of the cynical Garwood Jones (Rod Taylor), but Nell is hopelessly in love with him and there is no doubting which of her suitors she will choose. Unfortunately for Nell trouble is about to arrive in the form of Susanna Drake (Elizabeth Taylor).

Susanna is a southern belle and it’s never quite clear what she is doing in a hick town in the backwoods of Indiana. What matters is that for John and Susanna it is love at first sight. John is swept off his feet. John and Susanna get to know one another quite well during a 4th of July celebratory picnic, so well in fact that not long afterwards Susanna informs him that they are expecting a Happy Event. John is the kind of guy who will always do the right thing so there is never any doubt that he will marry her. He’s crazy about her anyway, so it’s not exactly a great sacrifice on his part.

Susanna is crazy about him as well, but unfortunately she’s also just plain crazy. She has never recovered from the psychological effects of a disastrous that destroyed the family mansion and killed her parents as well as her much-loved nanny Henrietta. There was a major scandal surrounding this fire, with rumours that her father had been having an affair with Henrietta. This being the South, Henrietta was both black and a slave. Susanna is haunted by memories of the fire, and also by a strange dread that she herself might be not entirely white.

As the Civil War rages Susanna becomes progressively more unstable until finally she disappears, taking their son with her. John is determined, despite the war, to find her.

There’s a lovely and amusing performance by Nigel Patrick as the professor at the local academy, an individual who combines cynicism, scepticism and idealism in a way that both disturbs and inspires his students. Lee Marvin is fun as the boozy but good-natured Flash Perkins.

The problem is John Shawnessy. And the problems with John Shawnessy stem from a lifeless performance by Montgomery Clift and the fact that he’s a character who is essentially an observer of life. There’s the danger that this type of character can end up coming across as bland and uninteresting and that’s what happens here. Clift was having problems with pills and booze even before the accident but the script is as much to blame as his acting.
There is one thing that makes this film worth watching, and that’s Susanna. She’s by far the most complex character in the movie and Elizabeth Taylor’s performance is by far the best in the movie as well. And this is where the movie gets interesting since it raises the always intriguing (to me at any rate) question of the differing ways that audiences in the 50s and audiences today would respond to such a character.

In some ways an audience today would be more sympathetic towards Susanna, seeing her more as a victim (of childhood trauma and/or mental illness) and less in moral terms. On the other hand her beliefs and many of her actions would have been much less shocking to audiences in 1957.

It’s clear though that Susanna was always intended to be an ambiguous character. Although she’s superficially set up as the Bad Girl to Eva Marie Saint’s Good Girl, it’s significant that Susanna doesn’t actually commit any of the sins that would have damned her in the eyes of an audience in 1957. She’s a faithful wife, she tries to be a good mother, and she’s willing to sacrifice herself for her husband. It’s true that she traps John into marriage (she wasn’t really pregnant) but he’d already fallen for her anyway. And we’re not told what exactly happened at that memorable 4th of July picnic - was it a deliberate act of seduction on Susanna’s part or simply two young people celebrating their nation’s birthday a little too enthusiastically? Nell makes a remark at one point suggesting that it was extremely common for such celebrations to end in such a manner.

The movie did Elizabeth Taylor no harm. I gained her an Oscar nomination, and as she later remarked, it taught her to “climb walls and chew scenery” - skills she was to put to good use in the coming years. Even though it is a little over-the-top she is careful not to portray Susanna as a stereotypical Wicked Woman, and she remains a sympathetic character.

It’s certainly a flawed movie, and desperately needed tightening up. Clift’s performance is a major deficit, especially since one of the key questions driving the plot is whether his devotion to his wife is motivated by pity or by love. Clift is so vague that we end up not having the slightest idea as to the answer. Worth watching though for the very complex and ambiguous female lead character and for Elizabeth Taylor’s performance.

Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967)

By 1967 The Production Code was starting to crumble and it had already been watered down in several important respects. Homosexuality was no longer a forbidden subject. It still had to be approached obliquely, but that actually works to the advantage of John Huston’s Reflections in a Golden Eye. Based on a scandalous 1941 Carson McCullers novella, it is after all a movie about repressed homosexuality. The indirect approach to the subject matter perfectly captures the mood of repression, of secrecy, of forbidden desires and hidden passions.

Marlon Brando plays Major Weldon Penderton, a lecturer in military tactics and leadership at an unnamed military base somewhere in the US South. His homosexual tendencies are so deeply buried he’s almost succeeded in hiding them from himself. He certainly hasn’t been able to hide his sexual problems from his wife Leonora (Elizabeth Taylor) and his failure to perform in bed is causing steadily escalating tensions. Penderton’s repressed homosexuality hasn’t just made him shut down sexually, it’s made him shut down emotionally as well. Leonara taunts him not so much because of sexual frustration, but simply because she wants to get some kind of response, any kind of response, from him. She can’t even get him to hate her.

The lack of sex isn’t a problem for her, because she’s getting plenty of that from Penderton’s best buddy, Colonel Morris Langton (Brian Keith). But he has his own problems. For one thing, he’s too obsessively masculine, too afraid of his emotions, and he’s clearly very uncomfortable around his wife’s very gay Filipino houseboy. His wife has repressions of her own, which led her to cut off her own nipples with a pair of garden shears.

And then there’s Private Williams, who cares for Leonora’s horse. He’s apparently a virgin, and he’s taken to sneaking into her house to watch her sleep while fondling her lingerie. But is it Leonora he’s obsessed with, or does he want to be Leonora? And Major Penderton has developed his own obsession with Private Williams, especially after seeing him riding in the woods naked.

This isn’t so much a movie about repressed homosexuality as it is a movie about repressed sexuality and repressed emotions in general, and in particular with the severely abnormal atmosphere of a military camp. The fact that Huston can’t confront the issues directly makes it impossible for him to present any of the characters or relationships in a simple straightforward way. Again this turns out to be a plus, adding layers of complexity and subtlety. The viewer really does inhabit this strange military world in which nothing can be stated openly and nothing can be felt directly. Huston’s approach may be indirect, but the movie certainly doesn’t avoid the issues. There’s no subtext here. Huston decided to use an odd sepia wash on the film that mutes and transforms the colours. This was lost in earlier releases but has been restored for the DVD release, and it adds to the feel of an unhealthy distorted reality.

The Brando role was originally intended for Montgomery Clift. Personally I think that would have been far too obvious a piece of casting for such a movie, and I think Brando’s macho but tortured performance is perfect. When you see him start to disintegrate in the middle of a lecture you’re seeing a touch of Brando brilliance. Elizabeth Taylor gives Leonora considerable complexity as well. She doesn’t play her as an emasculating bitch. She can be cruel certainly, but her pain and confusion over her loveless marriage are obvious and she shows unexpected moment of sensitivity. Taylor’s performance once again highlights just how bland and uninteresting most modern actresses are. Brian Keith is the real surprise. His performance is absolutely superb.

This is an odd movie, a movie that contemporary audiences and critics (and sad to say some modern critics as well) found too perplexing and too unconventional. It’s an odd mix of subtlety and outrageousness (Taylor publicly horse-whipping Brando certainly qualifies as outrageous). A strange and unusual piece of cinematic magic.