Kim Morgan raises a glass to Taylor's going wiggy as the baiting termagant in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
A shocking picture for 1966, the film was an expletive-ridden salvo that frightened some and impressed many. So notable was Woolf that the picture that was the first to use the words "goddamn" and "bugger" went on to Oscars galore, earning Elizabeth Taylor a richly deserved second Academy Award. It also garnered Sandy Dennis a Best Supporting Actress Oscar, a win for Haskell Wexler's gorgeous cinematography (he was the last to win for a category that doesn't exist anymore -- best Black and White cinematography). On top of those accolades, the movie was nominated for Best Picture, Best Actor (Richard Burton), Best Supporting Actor (George Segal), Best Director (Mike Nichols), Best Screenplay (Ernest Lehman), Best Sound, Best Original Music Score (for Alex North's at times gentle, haunting score), and Best Film Editing. Though Oscars are no barometer of greatness, they can point out a certain zeitgeist. This one? Mr. Burton referring to Miss Dennis as "monkey nipples."
Though Bonnie and Clyde helped kick-start the emerging '70s cinema, Virginia Woolf was a formidable front runner and, in a few ways, more disturbingly violent. In it, words and deeds are doled out with a ferocious vitriol that remains unmatched -- at least in terms of eloquence. Nothing so nasty has ever been so sickly beautiful. It certainly helps when Liz is slinging the sadism. That this still beautiful, still young woman would dress herself down to mean-mouthed, muffin-topped middle age was brave enough -- but her words and actions -- funny, terrible, sad and at times, strangely sweet, showed that Taylor truly understood this woman.
And dammit if Liz's dumpy, yet oddly sexy and potently poignant drunk and Burton's broke-down "bog" aren't beautiful losers. Yes, beautiful. Never mind how toxic they make their lives. Beginning with a gorgeous title sequence during which we watch History Professor George (Burton) and his saucy and sauced wife Martha (Taylor) walking back from a function drunk and cackling, the movie immediately places us in their dark, disconsolate universe -- one of shattered hopes, nihilism, and dipsomaniacal game playing. To George's surprise, Martha is expecting guests (at such a late hour) and, after their return home where she famously utters the Bette Davis line "What a dump" while harping on George about a movie: "What's the name of the picture?" (I'm always happy I know the name of the picture. It was the misunderstood, borderline brilliant King Vidor camp-fest Beyond the Forest). She eats chicken (she really devours that drumstick -- and it's all kinds of beautiful), calls George a "cluck," and they booze it up. And booze it up. And booze it up. And then come the guests...
Sheila O'Malley rescues Suddenly Last Summer from its dusty corner in the Southern Gothic curiosity shop and shines the sun on Taylor's nerve-bared, bravura performance:
The hothouse Southern sex-nightmare of Suddenly Last Summer is often overlooked, due to the sensationalistic plot (cannibalism, male prostitution, lobotomies - you know, Tennessee was pulling out all the stops), but the sensationalism is part of the fevered-dream that IS that story, and all participants in that film - Katharine Hepburn (descending in her open elevator like some horrifying deus ex machina), Montgomery Clift (pained and interior), and Elizabeth Taylor - frantic and beautiful and filled to the brim with the truth that NOBODY wants to hear - play it to the hilt. One cannot play Suddenly Last Summer subtly, or with ?nuance?. One cannot try to move that play into a grimy kitchen-sink environment. It must be played amongst palm fronds and tropic heat, the blinding white sun of the foreign beach towns, with a cold clinical mental ward hovering over every moment. Elizabeth Taylor must, literally, fight for her right to understand what had happened. She must fight for her voice, for her willingness to look at that which is ugly, and violent, and speak it for what it is. The stakes could not be higher. If she speaks, she will be lobotomized, so that she will never be able to tell the sordid story of Sebastian again. But she must � she must speak. Her crackup, backed up against the rocks in the beach town as the catastrophic events reach a climax, is a lesson in ?how to do it?. She writhes and flails and screams, then subsides, and then the horror breaks over her again, and she screams again, and it is just, just, what Tennessee Williams wrote.
I love Taylor in Reflections in a Golden Eye, a movie that still hasn't gotten its full due, just as Carson McCullers' novel still isn't appreciated for the spellbound original that it is.
And for Camille Paglia, it's Butterfield 8 (with Taylor's hilarious spat-out delivery of the classic cry, "Mama, face it--I was the slut of all time!") that bangs it home:
"Butterfield 8" was my Bible. She didn't want to make that film. She hated it her whole life. But "Butterfield 8" meant everything to me as an adolescent. It formed so many of my ideas about the pagan tradition descending to us from Babylon and surviving the Christian onslaught of the Middle Ages. The first time you see her in the film, in that tight, white, sewed-on slip, it's so amazing. Her dress is ripped on the floor, she brushes her teeth with scotch, and she goes up to the mirror and angrily writes "No sale!" on it in lipstick! To me she represented the ultimate power of the sexual woman.
There was a long feminist attack on the Hollywood sex symbol as a sex object, a commodified thing, passive to the male gaze, and it's such a crock! "Butterfield 8" really shows it. There's that incredible moment in the bar where she's wearing a svelte black dress and she and Laurence Harvey are fighting. He grabs her by the arm, and she grinds her stiletto heel into his elegant shoe. It's male vs. female -- a ferocious equal match. He's strong, but she's strong too! That scene shows the power and intensity of heterosexuality, with all its tensions and conflicts. It also shows how terrible current Hollywood filmmaking is -- how false and manufactured sex has become. There's no real eroticism anymore. "Butterfield 8" sizzles with eroticism, because of the psychological distance and animal attraction between male and female. The businessmen in that film are all in their uniforms, their black suits. They're like a horde of identical and characterless myrmidons or clones. They have wealth, they have power, but they're nothing compared to her! The film truly captures the complexities and struggles of sexuality -- all of which have been lost in our period of easy gender-bending. Everything's become so bland and boring now.
How true. I watched Love and Other Drugs last week, an enjoyable, unpredictable mixed bag of a movie (satire, love story, Apatow-ish comedy), but the highly touted sex scenes between Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway had no heat or emotional urgency to them, nothing underneath the athleticism that revealed genuine passion and appetite. The sex scenes were all about the stars' Beautifully Toned Bodies--you sensed their personal trainers were standing off camera, taking pride in their workmanship.
As Camille says, "We're in a period now where everything has to be taut -- in mind and body."
And taut minds and bodies have no give. They're efficient functional units, when what thrills and inspires us are the fallen gods.
Source: http://www.vanityfair.com/online/wolcott/2011/03/such-beautiful-sendoffs-elizabeth-taylor.html
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