Elizabeth Taylor

Boom!

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Elizabeth Taylor in spectacular headdress

“Beyond bad… the other side of camp… a perfect movie, really.” Schlock-loving John Waters’s verdict on Boom! is pretty much the mainstream take on this 1968 monstrosity, a vehicle for Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton that is so monumentally kitsch that everyday adjectives aren’t up to describing it. Camp or kitsch? Why not both? If camp is unknowing whereas kitsch is deliberate, this has to be the latter, since it’s an out-and-out attempt to fix Tennessee Williams’s unsuccessful play The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore by making it even more grandiose and exaggerated than it was on the stage. You may hate it but you cannot deny its spectacle. The great Douglas Slocombe … Read more

X, Y & Zee aka Zee and Co.

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Zee and Robert get close

Once Elizabeth Taylor realised she wasn’t going to be starring in Cleopatra, or anything like it, any more, she set off on a mad career jag that saw her playing a succession of weirdos, harpies, harridans, drunks and foul-mouthed vixens. If that sounds like something you’d like to see, X, Y & Zee, or Zee and Co., could be the thing for you. As an added bonus you get Michael Caine in one of his best “shouting” roles. It’s “You’re only supposed to blow the bloody doors off” all the way through here. Made in 1972 but mainlining the back end of 1960s London, it’s Taylor and Caine as a married couple who’ve … Read more

A Place in the Sun

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Elizabeth Taylor

Based on the appropriately named novel An American Tragedy, A Place in the Sun is a noirish and properly tragic melodrama hailed as a nigh-on perfect movie when it came out in 1951. Since then its stock has fallen somewhat, though the first two thirds still work beautifully, thanks in no small part to the performance of Shelley Winters, though Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor’s scenes together also exert a mesmeric pull. Its tragic hero is George (Clift), the poor relation of the wealthy manufacturing family the Eastmans, who, having tapped his uncle for a job, catches the eye of Alice (Winters), a demure sweetie who works alongside him on his uncle’s production … Read more

Secret Ceremony

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Cenci and Leonora in bed

At first sight bizarre, and at second sight even weirder, 1968’s Secret Ceremony is the sort of arthouse thriller that Elizabeth Taylor apparently never made. For Mia Farrow, her co-star, it looks like a warm-up for the following year’s Rosemary’s Baby. Robert Mitchum, yes Robert Mitchum, makes up the third leg of this very wonky stool. Forget Mitchum for the moment. Who are these women, it asks and eventually answers, wrongfooting us most of the way with its story of needy co-dependence in which Taylor plays a woman called Leonora and Farrow plays Cenci (pronounced Chenchee). The women, both dressed in black, meet on the top deck of a London double-decker bus. Cenci … Read more

Winter Kills

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A bandaged man tells Nick the truth about his dead brother

Nineteen years after the assassination of US President Tim Kegan in 1961, his brother learns from the lips of a dying bandaged man that the official report into who really fired the gun was wrong. I know that, says the dying man, because I was number two rifle that day, and what’s more I’ll tell you where the gun I used has been hidden. Using the murder and bits of the life and family background of President Kennedy as a template, William Richert’s 1979 drama then heads off into the undergrowth for a hack through the weeds of the improbable. Winter Kills isn’t just a conspiracy thriller but a conspiracy thriller constructed like … Read more

Identikit

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Elizabeth Taylor applying the war paint

Now this is a weird one. 1974’s Identikit, also known as The Driver’s Seat, and even occasionally as Psychotic, stars Elizabeth Taylor as what looks like a screen representation of her public persona – a batshit, flamboyant grande dame who we first meet in a German department store, where she is buying something garish and roundly insulting the sales assistant while doing so. Lise, it turns out, is a wanted woman. An identikit picture of her has been posted at all airports. The police are on her tail, for what we don’t know. And as she flies from Hamburg to Rome, they follow behind, questioning everyone Lise comes into contact with. Lise, for … Read more

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

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Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 27 February Elizabeth Taylor born, 1932 On this day in 1932 Elizabeth Taylor was born, in Hampstead Garden Suburb, London, UK. Her parents were American, originally from Arkansas, and her mother was a former actress. Often considered the last true star of Hollywood’s golden era – before TV made inroads in the 1950s – Taylor’s career started when she was nine, with There’s One Born Every Minute, followed up two years later with Lassie Come Home. Then came National Velvet, and at the age of 12 Elizabeth Taylor was a star. She remained, partly thanks to her violet eyes, double eyelashes, … Read more