Elizabeth Taylor: Fatal Beauty

Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in The Sand Piper (1965)

I recently viewed Elizabeth Taylor at two vastly different points in her career via two media platforms. The Sand Piper (1965) flew to me on a DVD from Netflix. Only a small handful of classic "old" films have found their way to the streaming service--mostly with Marilyn Monroe because she trends--but you can get almost any film ever made on the DVD mail-in deal. The Last Time I Saw Paris (1955) has been in public domain for many years and a low-grade print of the entire film is available on YouTube. It's even on a cheap DVD of Hollywood "classics" you can buy at Walmart. Of course Taylor is ravishingly beautiful in both films, but her acting veers from tolerable in Paris to execrable in Sand Piper. Also in both, she plays unconventional women in tragic relationships.

Taylor and Burton in The VIPs (1963).

In the 1960s, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor were the biggest stars in the world. Their scandalous affair on the set of Cleopatra captured the imagination of the entire globe. Unfortunately, most of their subsequent films together failed to capture anything except money. Taylor was never a great actress and Burton was (IMHO) largely overrated. He had a gorgeous speaking voice but rarely reached his full potential as an actor, indulging instead in jet-set luxury and alcohol. I saw a video of his Broadway Hamlet, directed by John Gielgud, and I found his performance richly spoken but hollow. The only two films in which both halves of this famous couple shone equally brightly were movie versions of stage plays--Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Taming of the Shrew.

The Sandpiper was their third film together. After Cleopatra, they made The VIPs. In that film the stars played a glamorous married couple breaking up at London's Heathrow Airport as fog delays all  flights. The melodrama of their storyline was obliterated by the scene-stealing limning of Orson Welles, Maggie Smith, and Oscar winner Margaret Rutherford as a dotty duchess. Fashion model Taylor is leaving workaholic tycoon Burton for playboy Louis Jourdan (who Burton refers to as a "male whore"). The theme of adultery carries over into Sand Piper with Taylor as a bohemian single mother falling in love with Burton as the minister-headmaster of her son's school.

Directed by Vincente Minnelli like as travelogue touting the beauty of Big Sur, this soapy melodrama reminded me of the films they used to show on CBS Friday Nights at the Movies (or was it Saturday?) when I was a kid. Since it was on a weekend night, we got to stay up and watch the whole movie. More often than not, they played forgettable comedies with titles like Doctor, You've Got to Be Kidding or Boys' Night Out and starring someone like George Hamilton.

Taylor and Burton exude sexuality, but little else. Burton seems tired and Taylor is way over-the-top, especially in a drippy scene when she confronts Robert Webber as a creepy former lover. Only Eva Marie Saint as Burton's starchy wife emerges as a believable character.

Get Your Hands Off My Hunk, Bitch!: Van Johnson, Donna Reed
and Taylor in The Last Time I Saw Paris (available on YouTube) 

Taylor is much more sincere in The Last Time I Saw Paris, another cheesey melodrama. This MGM product takes a brief F. Scott Fitzgerald short story (Babylon Revisited) and expands it into a big tragic weepy with Taylor on her deathbed--twice--of pneumonia. Ironically, a few years later she would actually be on her deathbed and get a condolence Oscar for an even lousier performance in Butterfield 8. Here she is young and fresh, but the screenplay by the Epstein brothers (who wrote Casablanca) can't make up its mind if she's a dangerous siren to Van Johnson's wholesome faux Fitzgerald or a tragic martyr. Walter Pidgeon is a charming layabout father and Donna Reed simmers as Taylor's jealous sister. Eva Gabor is a campy hoot as an international socialite with multiple husbands and young Roger Moore makes for pleasant eye candy.