BUtterfield 8 | | Cast : | Elizabeth Taylor, Laurence Harvey, Eddie Fisher | | Director : | Daniel Mann | | Studio : | Warner Studios | | Format : | Color, Widescreen | | Released Date : | November 04, 1960 | | DVD Released Date : | September 19, 2000 | | Language : | Unknown (Dubbed), English (Dubbed), French (Dubbed), French (Subtitled), English (Subtitled), English (Original Language), French (Original Language) | | Audience Rating : | NR (Not Rated) | | | BUY THIS DVD FROM AMAZON |
Customer Reviews
| Rating |  | | Date | January 27, 2005 | | Summary | Elizabeth Taylor saves this mediocre film | Content
 | Two desperate but independent minded proud people, a lawyer who marries into a wealthy family and a beautiful model who sleeps with men for affection, find in each other a diversion from wretched feelings of self-loathing. This diversion soon becomes an obsession, and then something more. But as their guarded exteriors become somewhat less so, they fall prey to the passionate, but often violent emotions they've inherited from their circumstances. Elizabeth Taylor's acting is superb and raw with emotion and mostly makes up for the incredulous, moralizing Hollywood ending which diverges considerably from the book and is not better served by the change. Still, it could have been much worse! |
| Rating | | | Date | January 23, 2005 | | Summary | "I loved it - every awful moment of it, I loved!" | Content
| "She's catnip to every cat in town," a bartender says of Gloria Wandrous, call girl and Party Girl #1, who is boozing it up, surrounded by a dozen men. Waking up in Wes Liggett's Fifth Avenue penthouse, she discovers he's left her a wad of money and a note saying, "Is $250 enough?" She hurls the money away, scrawling "No Sale" on the mirror with her lipstick. But she seems to forget that she is a call girl, and call girls accept money for services rendered. Unfortunately, Gloria is in love with Liggett, her "john", but he is married to someone else - a society matron poorly played by the cold, patrician beauty, Dina Merrill. As Gloria is leaving, she steals Ligget's wife's $7000 fur coat and starts all kinds of trouble. It certainly would have caused trouble today - the entire film is a PETA nightmare, as Gloria can be clocked wearing suede, lynx, coyote, mink, sable, beaver, and something that looks like skunk. The whole movie has Liz in her last fading bloom of youth, girded-to-the-gills and at the peak of her "eyebrows-of-death" period. Her Gloria-ously voluptuous figure is beginning to bulge and sag, but she is decked out to the nines in drop-dead stylish early-60s glamour. At the time, Liz and Jackie Kennedy were neck-and-neck in the glamour department, and the Jackie look is unmistakably present in Liz's styling. Though Jackie's never would be, Liz's cleavage is on abundant display. Cleavage was such a powerful metaphor for sex, then - a set-piece whose effectiveness would be impossible now (you practically have to show actors rutting on the floor to satisfy the modern taste). Liz was also at the peak of her Eddie Fisher period - playing a harlot on screen after stealing Fisher away from his real-life wife, Debbie Reynolds, only added to Liz's plummeting reputation. Fisher plays Gloria's friend who loves her but is not taken seriously by her. He's such a drip onscreen, that you can't help wondering how in real life this guy managed to attract one of the most glamorous women in the world. The suave and very continental Harvey is equally dull, especially as he commandeers that last 20 minutes of the film.
The part of Gloria won an Oscar for Liz Taylor - mysteriously, since the work is far inferior to many of Liz's previous films. Liz has proclaimed that this is the least favorite film she ever made - she was simply fulfilling the requirements of her contract. But when Liz is good, she's very, very good, but when she's bad, she gives it all she's got. Director Daniel Mann definitely had a way with leading-ladies. In addition to guiding Liz towards her Oscar, he did the same for Shirley Booth in *Come Back, Little Sheba* and Anna Magnani in *The Rose Tattoo*. Also directing Susan Hayward in *I'll Cry Tomorrow*, Mann certainly excels in these heavy-handed soapers. Based on the racy John O'Hara novel, the dialogue is dreadful. At one point Gloria tells her shrink, "I don't need you any more. I have no problems. I'm in love," as well as, "Someday Wes is going to find himself, and I want to be there." The script was so bad my sister and I veered off into a conversation about the Austin yogurt shop murders, and missed a scene full of lots of drinking, ultimatums and arched eyebrows, but we were riveted to the screen as Gloria is screaming, "Mama, face it! I was the slut of all time!" But even when shrieking, Liz is irresistible. And like Gloria says in the movie, "I loved it - every awful moment of it, I loved!" |
| Rating | | | Date | January 21, 2005 | | Summary | Liz Luscious in Glossy, "Racy" Melodrama | Content
| "Butterfield 8" is a much better picture than it's often given credit for, in spite of the excesses. In fact, its excesses are what make it fun. Elizabeth Taylor plays Gloria Wandrous, a model/partygirl who lives a fast, booze-soaked life without inhibitions (and with a pretty good sense of humor) but longs to be "respectable" and "normal" with the "Right Man." She also still lives with her mother, although her long-suffering mother tries to deny her daughter's lifestyle. When Gloria has a one-night-stand with Weston Ligget (Laurence Harvey), the man who has unhappily married into money, she feels she has at last found the security she has been looking for. As she tells her psychiatrist in a hilarious scene, "I'm cured!"
First of all, the opulent sets are gorgeous (lots of blues, chandeleirs, posh rooms, sumptuous clothes) and at the centerpiece is Ms. Gorgeous herself, La Liz in her prime. Wow, she was, as one reviewer noted, cosmically beautiful in a way few prior or since have come close: raven black hair; violet eyes with the thick double-lashes; florid coloring; the perfect eyebrows (thick but not bushy and tapered beautifully); beauty mark; beautiful nose; even a dimpled smile. She also was quite voluptuous and here is poured into her clothes, including her undergarments. Who wore a slip like Elizabeth Taylor? Her performance here is quite good -- she's definitely steeped in excess (in the opening scene, in fact, she brushes her teeth with booze and teeters through the lush apartment on high heels) but also sympathetic and puts across a complex range of emotions. Sure, the script reflects the attitudes of the times and there are moments of unintentional humor (such as when long-suffering "noble" wife of Ligget, the lovely Dina Merrill has a confrontational scene with her husband where he tells her *SPOILER* he's leaving because he can't go on disrespecting her, and she pleads, "Can't you try?"), but it's still a very complex portrait of Gloria, as embodied by Taylor, and her life. And it's a classic representation of the sexes in that time -- almost right out of a lurid pulp novel in Technicolor mixed with old-style Hollywood. Taylor in long black gloves and huge pearls. Terrific! Wish everyone wore hats still!
Laurence Harvey actually embodies the description Ian Fleming gave of James Bond in his novels with the piercing eyes, hard mouth and even the "comma of black hair" over his eye. He's a classic of this period, too, and the wooden acting is all part of it. It's not quite a stereotype, either; the characters are all fairly well drawn, in fact. The scene of the businessmen in the bar "making a joke" over Gloria ("most desirable girl in town and easiest to find," as the poster says), that the men who have her "number" would fill a stadium, is still an outrage, but even if women are no longer "branded" for being sexually "loose," the attitudes still persist. (Look at how people embrace the largely sexist hip-hop's slang "'ho" and think how many men still have women on their "budget"). We've come a long way, baby, but it ain't over! And probably never will be.
Yes, yes, the scoop surrounding the film was that Taylor was involved with Eddie Fisher (why, Elizabeth?) and broke up his marriage with Debbie Reynolds. But although he's fairly good here as her faithful friend, it would have been far more believable if he had been a gay man. As it stands, it feels absurd that a straight man would have the likes of Elizabeth Taylor coming to his apartment, flirting and tempting him, and remain chastely faithful to his girlfriend.
In any case, splashy, good fun and great to look at! |
| Rating | | | Date | January 02, 2005 | | Summary | Heavy handed | Content
| 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. |
| Rating | | | Date | November 10, 2004 | | Summary | Naughty girl! | Content
| Pretty good soaper with Liz Taylor, who trollops about town and trades barbs with Laurence Harvey--including a stiletto heel ground into his foot. Oh, behave!
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