An excerpt from "The Auteurist's Guide to the Elizabeth Taylor Filmography," Nomad Wide Screen

Joseph Losey with Taylor and Richard Burton on the set of the notori­ous Boom!

In this week’s issue of Nomad Editions’ Wide Screen, a trib­ute to Elizabeth Taylor, fea­tur­ing an obit­u­ary by the inef­fable Self-Styled Siren, a best-of-on-DVD con­sid­er­a­tion from Tony Dayoub, Vadim Rizov’s look at the best and worst of Taylor trib­utes, a couple of lovely photo port­fo­li­os assembled by our crack pic­ture edit­or Laurie Kratochvil, and a piece by myself on the Taylor filmo per­ceived through a sort-of auteur­ist prism. Below is a por­tion of the art­icle; to read it in its entirety, do con­sider a free tri­al sub­scrip­tion to the pub­lic­a­tion which you may learn about more here.

Mervyn LeRoy

“LeRoy has con­ver­ted his innate vul­gar­ity into a per­son­al style,” Andrew Sarris noted, before adding, “His Little Caesar is feeble next to Hawks’s Scarface, and his Little Women far lit­tler than Cukor’s, but you can’t have everything.” And indeed, for emo­tion­al power (or con­vin­cing Hollywood schmaltz), LeRoy’s 1949 ver­sion of the Louisa May Alcott clas­sic, star­ring Taylor as Amy, Meet Me in St. Louis’s ador­able mop­pet Margaret O’Brien as Beth, and June Allyson as Jo (and Peter Lawford as Laurie, yeesh) is no match for the 1933 film fea­tur­ing Katharine Hepburn as Jo, Joan Bennett as Amy, and Jean Parker as Beth. (Poor for­got­ten Douglass Montgomery played Laurie.) Still, it is pretty snappy in the man­ner that the dir­ect­or of such pre-code speed rides as Three on a Match, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, and Heat Lightning was some­thing of a past mas­ter at. Taylor had been slated to play the lead in LeRoy’s stab at a Biblical epic, Quo Vadis, but pro­duc­tion hassles scotched that; she did an uncred­ited extra bit as an arena slave.

Joseph Losey

The American-born Losey left the United States in the 1950s (HUAC, again) and con­tin­ued his career in Europe; by the time he teamed up with Taylor and Burton, he was well-regarded not just for his Hollywood and post-Hollywood noirs (The Prowler and Time Without Pity among them) but for two films, Accident and The Servant, made in col­lab­or­a­tion with the esteemed play­wright Harold Pinter. Still, viable mar­ket­place work seemed to elude him, so he jumped at the chance to work with the then-married inter­na­tion­al super­stars. But again with Tennessee Williams! In this case, 1968’s Boom! a ver­sion of one of Williams’s oddest works, The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, in which a much mar­ried reclus­ive woman of wealth is vis­ited by a sham­bling, poet­ic Angel of Death. Guess who plays whom. As I wrote of this film, and Taylor’s per­form­ance, else­where, pri­or to her passing: “prob­lem­at­ic for Taylor was the fact that she seemed to for­get more and more about act­ing as the years went on. Look at her in A Place in the Sun, or in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and then look at her here. She shows a nar­row range in both of the former films, but at least she’s work­ing that range; she’s pay­ing atten­tion and work­ing with pre­ci­sion. Here she’s all over the place, the res­ult of Losey’s inab­il­ity, or is it refus­al, to dir­ect her.” Boom! is still, in some circles, con­sidered a can­did­ate for Worst Film Ever made… although of course John Waters con­siders it a clas­sic of its kind. 

Despite the crit­ic­al drub­bing, Losey and Taylor were actu­ally eager to work togeth­er again, and they teamed up almost imme­di­ately there­after for Secret Ceremony, a very pecu­li­ar film in which Hollywood icon­o­graphy goes way against the grain of art-film theme and treat­ment. Again, in anoth­er con­text I wrote this about the film: “The first 20 minutes are kind of remark­able. They’re almost entirely dialogue-free, and depict a little cat-and-mouse game between Taylor’s char­ac­ter Leonora (who we later find out is a pros­ti­tute) and the rather gaga girl Cenci (Mia Farrow, unnerv­ingly Paltrow-esque avant la lettre)… [W]hat we’re watch­ing isn’t about plaus­ib­il­ity. It’s cine­mat­ic theat­er of the absurd with hor­ror flour­ishes, and it’s mes­mer­iz­ing… The prob­lem, finally, is with the fig­ures. Even 40 years after the fact, the strongest thing that registers here is that two Hollywood legends are act­ing really, really weird. By the time Taylor and Farrow wind up play-fighting over a rub­ber ducky in an over­size bathtub, all bets are off as far as this piece work­ing in any way that Losey and com­pany might have inten­ded.” Secret Ceremony had suf­fi­cient strengths to sug­gest that a third Taylor-Losey col­lab­or­a­tion — per­haps on a less affected piece of con­tem­por­ary mater­i­al, — might have borne more artist­ic­ally sat­is­fy­ing fruit. But it was not to be. Losey did, how­ever, re-team with Burton in 1972 for the under­seen and under­rated The Assasination of Trotsky.

Joseph L. Mankiewicz

The great writer and director’s mas­ter­piece All About Eve shows he was thor­oughly at home with ambi­tion, betray­al and self-destruction when it was set in the world of reas­on­ably func­tion­al (in a day-to-day sense) indi­vidu­als. He was on much less cer­tain foot­ing in deal­ing with the deranged mod­ern baroque realms con­cocted by Tennessee Williams. Hence, 1959’s Suddenly, Last Summer, adap­ted by Gore Vidal from a Williams play, is oft-regarded as a piece of high camp, des­pite its scru­pu­lously ser­i­ous treat­ment, and not­with­stand­ing the, thespic efforts of Taylor, Katharine Hepburn, and a par­tic­u­larly damaged-seeming Montgomery Clift. Its near-hysteria is for some ameli­or­ated by the sight of Taylor at her most rav­ish­ing in a white one-piece swimsuit.

Mankiewicz and Taylor got on suf­fi­ciently well dur­ing the mak­ing of the pic­ture, and that factored into Mankiewicz’s ill-fated assign­ment to replace Rouben Mamoulian on the set of the lav­ish Cleopatra, the troubled pro­duc­tion that birthed the Taylor-Burton romance. Again, it seems that a his­tor­ic­al epic set in the ancient world is a less-than-congenial set­ting for Mankiewicz’s par­tic­u­lar tal­ents, but he proved very ded­ic­ated to the film, or the idea of the film, and con­cocted a six-hour ver­sion that he wanted to have released in two parts. An attempt to recon­struct that ver­sion is under­way; in the mean­time, the extant four-hour cut is, while cer­tainly on the stiff side, hardly the dis­aster it was pro­claimed to be at the time of the picture’s box-office flop, which some have cited as the begin­ning of the end for the entity that once was 20^th Century Fox.

Vincente Minnelli

Oddly enough, while many cinephiles might tend to rank the three col­lab­or­a­tions between Taylor and the great cine­mat­ic styl­ist Vincente Minnelli as minor Minnelli works, seen from a par­tic­u­lar angle — the Taylor one — this team­ing might be viewed as unusu­ally fruit­ful, pro­du­cing two of the most enjoy­able and con­geni­al films of her career, and one of the more unusu­al and overtly thought­ful as well. In 1950’s Father of the Bride, Taylor was still an ingénue (all of 18), co-starring as the daugh­ter of Spencer Tracy and Joan Bennett, about to marry ami­able boy-next-door type Don Taylor (no rela­tion). A fas­cin­at­ing look at the alcohol-fueled American middle class of the post-war era, it’s a snappy, know­ing com­edy to which Minnelli brings more than a soupçon of his dec­or­at­ive taste. His sure hand with the Comedy of Anxiety, in this par­tic­u­lar case eco­nom­ic anxi­ety, is also felt. But it’s felt even more strongly in the film’s 1951 sequel, Father’s Little Dividend, admit­tedly in a scene in which Taylor doesn’t par­ti­cip­ate, and which is not as comed­ic as all that; it’s a sequence late in the pic­ture in which Tracy’s char­ac­ter “loses” his new grand­child. Almost as night­mar­ish and angst-ridden as the Halloween scene in Meet Me in St. Louis, it’s a mini-masterpiece of Minnelli edgi­ness. Similarly, Minnelli’s 1965 The Sandpiper , star­ring Taylor as a free spir­it and single mom and Burton as the min­is­ter and edu­cat­or who falls for her — and framed by the majest­ic vis­tas of Big Sur coun­try — is best con­sidered not as a Taylor-Burton vehicle but in the con­tinuüm of Minnelli dra­mas about the anxious­ness of non­con­form­ity such as Tea and Sympathy, Home from the Hill, The Cobweb, and so on. In this light, the pic­ture works beau­ti­fully and stands out as one of Minnelli’s stronger ’60s efforts.