An excerpt from "The Auteurist's Guide to the Elizabeth Taylor Filmography," Nomad Wide Screen

Joseph Losey with Taylor and Richard Burton on the set of the notorious Boom!

In this week's issue of Nomad Editions' Wide Screen, a tribute to Elizabeth Taylor, featuring an obituary by the ineffable Self-Styled Siren, a best-of-on-DVD consideration from Tony Dayoub, Vadim Rizov's look at the best and worst of Taylor tributes, a couple of lovely photo portfolios assembled by our crack picture editor Laurie Kratochvil, and a piece by myself on the Taylor filmo perceived through a sort-of auteurist prism. Below is a portion of the article; to read it in its entirety, do consider a free trial subscription to the publication which you may learn about more here.

Mervyn LeRoy

“LeRoy has converted his innate vulgarity into a personal style,” Andrew Sarris noted, before adding, “His Little Caesar is feeble next to Hawks’s Scarface, and his Little Women far littler than Cukor’s, but you can’t have everything.” And indeed, for emotional power (or convincing Hollywood schmaltz), LeRoy’s 1949 version of the Louisa May Alcott classic, starring Taylor as Amy, Meet Me in St. Louis’s adorable moppet Margaret O’Brien as Beth, and June Allyson as Jo (and Peter Lawford as Laurie, yeesh) is no match for the 1933 film featuring Katharine Hepburn as Jo, Joan Bennett as Amy, and Jean Parker as Beth. (Poor forgotten Douglass Montgomery played Laurie.) Still, it is pretty snappy in the manner that the director of such pre-code speed rides as Three on a Match, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, and Heat Lightning was something of a past master at. Taylor had been slated to play the lead in LeRoy’s stab at a Biblical epic, Quo Vadis, but production hassles scotched that; she did an uncredited extra bit as an arena slave.

Joseph Losey

The American-born Losey left the United States in the 1950s (HUAC, again) and continued his career in Europe; by the time he teamed up with Taylor and Burton, he was well-regarded not just for his Hollywood and post-Hollywood noirs (The Prowler and Time Without Pity among them) but for two films, Accident and The Servant, made in collaboration with the esteemed playwright Harold Pinter. Still, viable marketplace work seemed to elude him, so he jumped at the chance to work with the then-married international superstars. But again with Tennessee Williams! In this case, 1968’s Boom! a version of one of Williams’s oddest works, The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, in which a much married reclusive woman of wealth is visited by a shambling, poetic Angel of Death. Guess who plays whom. As I wrote of this film, and Taylor’s performance, elsewhere, prior to her passing: “problematic for Taylor was the fact that she seemed to forget more and more about acting as the years went on. Look at her in A Place in the Sun, or in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and then look at her here. She shows a narrow range in both of the former films, but at least she’s working that range; she’s paying attention and working with precision. Here she’s all over the place, the result of Losey’s inability, or is it refusal, to direct her.” Boom! is still, in some circles, considered a candidate for Worst Film Ever made… although of course John Waters considers it a classic of its kind. 

Despite the critical drubbing, Losey and Taylor were actually eager to work together again, and they teamed up almost immediately thereafter for Secret Ceremony, a very peculiar film in which Hollywood iconography goes way against the grain of art-film theme and treatment. Again, in another context I wrote this about the film: “The first 20 minutes are kind of remarkable. They’re almost entirely dialogue-free, and depict a little cat-and-mouse game between Taylor’s character Leonora (who we later find out is a prostitute) and the rather gaga girl Cenci (Mia Farrow, unnervingly Paltrow-esque avant la lettre)… [W]hat we’re watching isn’t about plausibility. It’s cinematic theater of the absurd with horror flourishes, and it’s mesmerizing... The problem, finally, is with the figures. Even 40 years after the fact, the strongest thing that registers here is that two Hollywood legends are acting really, really weird. By the time Taylor and Farrow wind up play-fighting over a rubber ducky in an oversize bathtub, all bets are off as far as this piece working in any way that Losey and company might have intended.” Secret Ceremony had sufficient strengths to suggest that a third Taylor-Losey collaboration — perhaps on a less affected piece of contemporary material, — might have borne more artistically satisfying fruit. But it was not to be. Losey did, however, re-team with Burton in 1972 for the underseen and underrated The Assasination of Trotsky.

Joseph L. Mankiewicz

The great writer and director’s masterpiece All About Eve shows he was thoroughly at home with ambition, betrayal and self-destruction when it was set in the world of reasonably functional (in a day-to-day sense) individuals. He was on much less certain footing in dealing with the deranged modern baroque realms concocted by Tennessee Williams. Hence, 1959’s Suddenly, Last Summer, adapted by Gore Vidal from a Williams play, is oft-regarded as a piece of high camp, despite its scrupulously serious treatment, and notwithstanding the, thespic efforts of Taylor, Katharine Hepburn, and a particularly damaged-seeming Montgomery Clift. Its near-hysteria is for some ameliorated by the sight of Taylor at her most ravishing in a white one-piece swimsuit.

Mankiewicz and Taylor got on sufficiently well during the making of the picture, and that factored into Mankiewicz’s ill-fated assignment to replace Rouben Mamoulian on the set of the lavish Cleopatra, the troubled production that birthed the Taylor-Burton romance. Again, it seems that a historical epic set in the ancient world is a less-than-congenial setting for Mankiewicz’s particular talents, but he proved very dedicated to the film, or the idea of the film, and concocted a six-hour version that he wanted to have released in two parts. An attempt to reconstruct that version is underway; in the meantime, the extant four-hour cut is, while certainly on the stiff side, hardly the disaster it was proclaimed to be at the time of the picture’s box-office flop, which some have cited as the beginning of the end for the entity that once was 20^th Century Fox.

Vincente Minnelli

Oddly enough, while many cinephiles might tend to rank the three collaborations between Taylor and the great cinematic stylist Vincente Minnelli as minor Minnelli works, seen from a particular angle — the Taylor one — this teaming might be viewed as unusually fruitful, producing two of the most enjoyable and congenial films of her career, and one of the more unusual and overtly thoughtful as well. In 1950’s Father of the Bride, Taylor was still an ingénue (all of 18), co-starring as the daughter of Spencer Tracy and Joan Bennett, about to marry amiable boy-next-door type Don Taylor (no relation). A fascinating look at the alcohol-fueled American middle class of the post-war era, it’s a snappy, knowing comedy to which Minnelli brings more than a soupçon of his decorative taste. His sure hand with the Comedy of Anxiety, in this particular case economic anxiety, is also felt. But it’s felt even more strongly in the film’s 1951 sequel, Father’s Little Dividend, admittedly in a scene in which Taylor doesn’t participate, and which is not as comedic as all that; it’s a sequence late in the picture in which Tracy’s character “loses” his new grandchild. Almost as nightmarish and angst-ridden as the Halloween scene in Meet Me in St. Louis, it’s a mini-masterpiece of Minnelli edginess. Similarly, Minnelli’s 1965 The Sandpiper , starring Taylor as a free spirit and single mom and Burton as the minister and educator who falls for her — and framed by the majestic vistas of Big Sur country — is best considered not as a Taylor-Burton vehicle but in the continuum of Minnelli dramas about the anxiousness of nonconformity such as Tea and Sympathy, Home from the Hill, The Cobweb, and so on. In this light, the picture works beautifully and stands out as one of Minnelli’s stronger ’60s efforts.

Comments

[partisan]

One point, that I don't think has been made so far in the commentary on Taylor's death. Richard Burton, after WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF, or perhaps ANNE OF A THOUSAND DAYS, saw his acting reputation collapse. So much so that Michael Medved and his brother included him as the worst actor of his day, and this did nothing to improve his status. But although I haven't seen either film, I strongly suspect 1984 stands up better than THE FLINTSTONES.

[Glenn Kenny]

Yeah, but Michael and Harry Medved also put "Last Year At Marienbad" in their "Worst Movies of All Time" book. Also, think about it: MICHAEL MEDVED. So there's that.

His later years are problematic, yeah, because he was a mess, but when he could pull together and focus, or be compelled to give a damn about the material, he could still do something. He's fine in "1984," and better than that in "Assassination of Trotsky." But quite a lot of what you see of Burton on screen late in his career is, we might as well face it, a kind of cautionary tale of untreated alcoholism.

[partisan]

I suppose I should have rephrased that first comment to be more sarcastic about the Medveds: Burton's reputation was so bad that even the Medveds could denounce him, and people would still agree with them.

[david hare]

Burton is definitely his own worst enemy in most of his films. But Trotsky is a long unheralded great work -for him and for Losey IMO, after a decade of BS Arthouse events from Losey himself. It resonates as a movie with Losey's very best. Like M. Klein with Delon, and in both movies Losey seems to let his camera loose onto the last vision of human personality that seemed to interest him - the disintegration of the male ego into landscape, seeingly only through the male.

Burton also nearly ruins an otherwise perfect film - Cleopatra. I dunno whether BrianD agrees with me. I can only say thanx to Brian I now revere this film as a transcendental masterpiece. (Brian there's a FOX HD broadcast of this which runs oer 4 hours and is totally staggering.)

I think I just wish Peter Finch had been on line to get the gig, rather than fucking Burton.

[Brian Dauth]

David H: Thanks for the compliment -- it is just my task in life: making new CELOPATRA supporters one spectator at a time. As for Burton: he has always seemed adequate to me, bringing off Antony's petulance and vanity. One thing that should be noted: most of the cuts to JLM’s original 6-hour, two-movie version were made in the Antony section. Also, Stephen Boyd was the original choice for Antony; Finch was slated to play Julius Caesar with Rex Harrison making a splendid substitute.

[Asher]

You know, I don't even like Mankiewicz's so-called masterpieces that much; though I know it isn't fashionable around here to fault a director for not liking his characters, there's that, and then there's his dinner theater, sub-Wildean quippy way of showing you just how much he dislikes them. That said, I don't know if anyone could have done a good job with SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER. Maybe Sirk could have done it in a completely ironic way; I suppose Delmer Daves could have at least made enjoyable pulp out of it. But with "big" moments like "cut the truth out of my brain, is that what you want, Aunt Vi," it'd be tough. Tennessee Williams has a lot of unfortunate film dialogue to answer for, and it's unfortunate that Taylor spent so much of her career reading it

[Glenn Kenny]

Asher, I like Mankiewicz more than you do, but not as much as some others...that said, I think the notion of a Delmer-Daves-directed "Suddenly Last Summer" is INSPIRED. Stahl might have been able to make something of it, too. Then there's Fasssbinder...

[Brian Dauth]

Asher: I find that Mankiewicz rarely dislikes any of his characters - especially his women. He is justly skeptical of masculinity and masculine power, but even in his portraits of men, he is capacious.

As for S,LS: Mankiewicz improves Williams’ narrative in playing down the homo self-hatred and making the film about class, money, and power (Tennessee was undergoing psychoanalysis to cure his homosexuality when he wrote the play. It failed, but echoes of the treatment remain in the play). I doubt that Sirkian irony or Daves-brand pulp would be able to do justice to Williams’ lyrical/queer tragedy. Fassbinder, however, would be an inspired choice, but then he was deeply influenced by and appreciative of Mankiewicz (Almodovar would be another superb option).

I do not think Williams has anything to apologize for regarding his dialogue: he was America’s greatest poet of the stage. His language was unfailingly lyrical, and suffered only when rewritten by directors who lacked his facility with words. Mankiewicz was always proud that Tennessee could not identify the lines he added to the original play.

[christian]

I finally watched the Fox HD 4-Hour CLEOPATRA - twice. It's not at all a bad movie, and Rex Harrison is fantastic. Burton is awesome too, and plays the petulance just right. But it's Roddy McDowall who steals the epic.

[jbryant]

I'm drooling at the thought of an HD CLEOPATRA. Though I have HD, my cable system's Fox Movie Channel is standard def only. Drat!

[christian]

And the most amazing thing about CLEOPATRA now is looking at actual humans drag a gigantic fucking-normous cat statue bearing Liz Taylor through an actual massive set. Talk about Roman decadence!

[jbryant]

Yeah, that's an amazing scene, even in standard def on a 42" screen.