Butterfield 8
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Movie Reviews of Butterfield 8
Movie Review: A Trip Back In Time
Summary: 5 Stars
Par l, Superior. Liz,s emoting was so sincere and genuine that you almost had to share them and join her. Besides, my beautiful wife of 64-years could have been a stand-in and double for her and Liz.s action took me back to our childhood days when we were so much in love and still are. It was a nice journey in retrospect.Movie Review: Romantic Drama
Summary: 5 Stars
The girl , Elizabeth Taylor has dated gentlemen from nearly every ivy league university.
Her life is complex. She has problems.
She leaves her mother. Mother's instincts say "I have the feeling I'll never see you again".
Movie Review: cj
Summary: 5 Stars
If you like Elizabeth Taylor, this movie is a must for your collection. I can see why Liz rec'd an Academy Award for her performance. Thanks Amazon, for having this movie on your shelf.Movie Review: As MGM soap opera, as conventional romantic tragedy, the movie is flavorless, but not impossible, and Liz is all right...
Summary: 4 Stars
Liz would seem to have been ideal casting for the role of a defiant call girl, but she didn't like the part: "The role they want me to play is little better than a prostitute," she protested... Most actresses would enjoy the chance to play a B-girl, but Liz never coveted the showy roles, she never played whores or drunks or nuns or aspiring actresses... Her audience wanted to see her in sensational roles, but she preferred being proper...
Rewritten, the edge taken off, John O'Hara's Gloria Wandrous emerges somewhat undefined... The movie is so cautious that it's never clear exactly how the girl makes her living... She models, apparently, but does she get paid for sleeping with men, or does she sleep with men simply because she likes to?
At the height of a family argument, Gloria confesses to her mother that she was the slut of all time, but there is no evidence of this on screen... As in "The Last Time I Saw Paris," Liz--as girl-about-town--is pallid, almost prissy... She doesn't have the freedom to portray amoral characters... She doesn't have the manic self-destructiveness the part requires... The script makes the character another of Taylor's tragic roles: Gloria Wandrous is a woman, mistreated by her man, who dies of unrequited love...
Like the conception of its heroine, the movie is infected with an enervating morality: once a sinner, the message goes, always a sinner... Deep down, this MGM Gloria feels that her indelible history of nights on the town has disqualified her for the likes of a respectable man... Self-convicted as a bad girl, she knows she's doomed... Much more than the novel, the film emphasizes Gloria's lust for respectability... Weston Liggett (Laurence Harvey), the wealthy Yale man, is her one big chance for graduation to the classy life of yachts and weekends in the country... It's as if the character wants to enter the world a younger Taylor so ably embodied in "A Place in the Sun." O'Hara's tough, precise, lovingly detailed novel has been transformed into Metro soap, a lament about a sort of hooker with a persistent desire for suburbia...
But there are moments: the wordless opening scene, Gloria stained and rumpled after a night with Liggett; Gloria trading cracks with her mother's sardonic friend, and with her best friend's girlfriend; Gloria convulsed in tears during an argument with her meek mother (Mildred Dunnock).
Taylor and Laurence Harvey mix like oil and water, but her scenes with Eddie Fisher, who plays her platonic, disapproving buddy are strongly build... Eddie gives her quiet support, the way Montgomery Clift always gave her strength on screen...
Her big scene is her confession to Eddie about how she got started in the life: she was seduced by a house guest when she was thirteen, and she liked it (very wide-eyed, very high-pitched and piercing here), she has always 'liked' it! The confession scene is a Taylor trademark during this period: in "Raintree County," "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," "Suddenly, Last Summer," and here, confessions dramatically lit and photographed are the local points of her performances...
Liz gets the character's self-pity, her sentimentality, her loneliness; she can do the smart answers, the head lifted in defiance... She plays, in short, with an authority that had deepened since "Giant." In "Butterfield 8," she dominates the way a star is supposed to dominate even if, finally, the role lacks definition...
Movie Review: Taylor at her Sexiest
Summary: 4 Stars
This is my favorite Elizabeth Taylor performance.
Writer Paul Monette refers to this film as being one in a 'trilogy' of bad girl roles for Elizabeth Taylor--the other two being "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof"(1958) and "Suddenly,Last Summer"(1959). These three films should be in every DVD collection. Certainly they present Taylor at her absolute physical peak, but they also show the dark side of her sexuality, which is quite riveting.
Taylor loves to refer to this movie as "trash", even though she won an Oscar for the role. Maybe she felt she was being exploited by the studio with this film's content due to her highly publicized love affairs at the time. However, SEX SELLS, and as a beautiful, voluptuous, and semi-amoral model, Taylor has never been better. She simply smoulders in this film, especially in the 'morning after' scenes in the beginning. Taylor in her tight slip, drink in hand, is now an iconic Hollywood image. Also, she and Laurence Harvey make a VERY HOT team, SCORCHING, something we've never seen with Taylor and Richard Burton.
The movie is really a TAYLOR STAR VECHICLE, it's all about HER, with a great leading man, and some excellent supporting players. A great showcase. And Elizabeth does do some good acting, very moving in the confession scene and in her last scene with Harvey as she tries to escape him. Her acting here is certainly Oscar-worthy to me.
Also interesting is the fact that this may be the first American film to link child molestation with promiscuity, or even talk about such subjects. Remember this was made in 1960.
For me this film is part of another trilogy... one of three Best Actress Oscar-winning roles of women gambling with their sexuality to find happiness, with each one losing--- Elizabeth here, Simone Signoret in "Room at the Top" (1959), and Julie Christie in "Darling" (1965)... and Laurence Harvey was in all THREE films!!