Butterfield 8
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Movie Reviews of Butterfield 8
Movie Review: Heavy handed
Summary: 3 Stars
Butterfield 8 is one of those old-time movies written after the fashion of medieval morality plays. Liz Taylor is beautiful and the clothes are great, but it is rather unsubtle in its message.Movie Review: It Coulda Been a Contender . . .
Summary: 2 Stars
The first few minutes are the best; icy strings and saxophones and Liz Taylor waking up in what is obviously a strange bed. She crawls out, dons a slip, brushes her teeth with bourbon and takes a tour of her pick-up's Park Avenue digs. It doesn't quite match the combination of doom and sour comedy with which John O'Hara began the novel of the same title, but it gets close. And as in the book, Taylor, as Gloria Wandrous, steals a mink coat and heads home.
And then everything goes wrong. O'Hara's novel was a bit trashy at times, but it was in no way a soap opera. The script, by Charles Schnee and John Michael Hayes, all but drowns in suds and overwrought dialogue. Taylor, although really too old to be playing Gloria, got at the character's wit and self-destructive streak and even made some of the god-awful talk compelling. As Weston Liggett, the human sewage who helps to send Gloria to her doom, Laurence Harvey is very good as long as he's being rotten and predatory; he tries manfully to convince us that Liggett has some sort of humanity benath his tailored scales, but fails. And Dina Merrill isn't even given a chance to play his pathetic wife, who in the book is tied by emotional needs and sexual attraction to a man she knows is destroying her bit by bit. She changes shirtwaists every few scenes and smiles through her tears. Eddie Fisher does what he can with the role of Gloria's platonic friend, who narrates the book in flashback, and he's actually not all that bad, just sort of irrelevant in this version of things. One could also talk about the film's absurd ending and the attempt to elevate the ghastly Wandrous-Liggett liaison to a tale of doomed and forbidden love, but it's sheer waste of breath, as would be any words about Daniel Mann's mostly non-existant direction--he made sure the actors hit their marks and let the crew do the rest.
The crew knew what they were doing; Joseph Ruttenburg did nice location photography in New York and lit the interiors to within an inch of their life. Helen Rose made Taylor look gorgeous and Dina Merrill appropriately WASPy. Bronislau Kaper's music is one of the few things in the film that seem influenced by O'Hara's novel itself; musky with sex and despair and icy with a sense of impending doom--too bad none of that made it into the script . . .
Movie Review: "Liz IS big. It's the picture that got small"
Summary: 2 Stars
Elizabeth Taylor was one of the most beautiful women in the world back in 1960 and she's always been a very talented actress. As the promiscuous model that finally fell in love, Taylor was the best thing in the dated, overly melodramatic, often ridiculous movie that was adapted from the John O'Hara's novel (written in 1935). I did not read "Butterfield 8" but I can't believe that the author of "Appointment in Samarra, and "The Lockwood Concern" wrote the stuff the cheap soap-operas are made of. Liz was big and she deserved her first Oscar but there are so many bad things about the movie - uninteresting characters, uninspired acting by the male protagonists, horrible irritating musical score - just a few of them. I read that Taylor hated the move when she was making it and she hates it now - I don't blame her. Taylor - Yes, the movie - no
Movie Review: Wrong number for Liz
Summary: 2 Stars
While Elizabeth Taylor is visually beautiful in this film the script is extremely dated and hackneyed. Women are all sluts or as blindly devoted as dogs. Being a "fallen" woman means you have to die dramatically. The searing scene where Taylor reveals the trauma that made her what she is is the only dramatically realistic minutes in the movie. Everything else is cliched dialogue and overheated acting. Better to remember Liz for A Place in the Sun or some of her other better films.
The believability of scriptwriting and acting has improved light years since this quaint early 60's period piece.
Movie Review: Pretty dated
Summary: 2 Stars
Elizabeth Taylor won an Oscar for this overheated drama about a call girl wanting to go straight and find love. To me, the movie was terribly dated. The awful incidental music, complete at one point with a fully-orchestrated fugue in four parts, was intrusive and the dialogue was stilted. Taylor's acting was OK -- she was sexy in a kind of lush, overheated way. But the rest of the acting was so-so at best. Eddie Fisher demonstrated why this was one of only a couple of movies he appeared in and Laurence Harvey's hair was his most expressive feature.