The Incredible Melting Marlon (REFLECTION IN A GOLDEN EYE)

"It just occurred to me, you don't believe I want to repent, is that it? Did it ever occur to you that some people might be all repentance and no sin? I may start a mission to help your kind. Come all ye repentants and let us bring a little sin into your lives." -- Sky Masterson (Guys and Dolls)

It's hard to believe the same actor who played Sky Masterson so nimbly in the film version of GUY AND DOLLS would want to suffer through something so repressed as the role of Major Pendleton in REFLECTIONS IN A GOLDEN EYE (1967). Psychosexually Freudian in the extremis, it's from a time (McCullers wrote it in the 1940s) when there was no 'out' of the closet without beatings and jail time. Repression cooked our literature in its egg.

I'd love to love this film, as I love most of John Huston's work and it has so many things going for it, but in the end REFLECTIONS reveals a sad, un-sordid truth: not all Southern Gothic Freudian hothouse pulp has aged as well as as others. The difference between Carson McCullers and her roster of closeted social misfits vs. those of her friend, the great Tennessee Williams, is as sweaty summer when it's too hot to move vs. a cool evening with mint julep and minimal mosquitoes. I'd rather watch Richard Burton swill his way through the scenery in NIGHT OF THE IGUANA for the 37th time than watch Brando soak up the masochistic vapors while his wild stallion wife Liz Taylor (her best line, whispered into Marlon's ear: "Son, were you ever taken out in the street and thrashed by a naked woman?") cavorts and is stalked by a young lad who likes to ride naked on Liz Taylor's horse and smell her underwear while she sleeps (Brando is of course in a separate bedroom). In his repressed funk, Brando mistakes the stalker's attentions as queer signals towards his own sweaty obsessive self.

In short here are lots of flustered, coded triangles with old McCullers. Yet for all the litany of perversions and Baby's First Freud symbolism it's all rawther airless. The golden eye refers to an idol, unmoving, dead, but all-seeing. Such is the major, or maybe the sun, or, well, you know how dirty double entendres are the very core and existence of the South. I shudder to guess. But Williams would have flushed out the mythic connections for Huston a wee better, the idol thing seems like an afterthought rather than a crux.

Any similarity to the hindquarters of a horse is strictly intentional.

The whole Freud thing was super huge in the kind of drunken suburban swinger circles depicted in the film during the 1950s, a full circle of coming which Huston embodied in real life, but as a director Huston depended on a source novel and screenwriter who'd faced danger, either from armed men, bulls, drugs, gay bashers, or drinks, and thus was able to write the kind of gutsy harpoon-in-the-eye-of-god prose Huston was best at filming. McCullers suffered terrible illnesses and a lavender marriage but if you're all closeted and repressed and horny and sober and sweaty in your little Phillipino houseboy genital and nipple mutilating cocktails fashion, why even bother setting your mess in a military school at all, or even in the south, if it's not going to heat to a boil and runneth over into lurid murders and mob violence? Here there's not much to suggest more than a low simmer, and immediately upon boiling, film concludes. And why put Marlon Brando in a role that wastes his talents? Where be his thunderous, Marc Antony monologue moment? If you go to the Preakness, do you want to see the best horse just stand still and stare longingly at a carrot? Not that the big climax where poor Pendleton genuinely thinks he's about to get lucky isn't moving, brilliantly underplayed (a mere moment to check his hair in the mirror), deeply sad, and bitterly hilarious, but it comes too late, and ends with a ghastly bit of repetitive panning camera and onscreen text from the book that tries to be horrific and ironic but is just clumsy. 

The eye offends thee, no?

The side cast includes Julie Harris as a scenery-nibbler who cut off her nipples with garden shears (awhile before the film begins - we never see them), and engages in god knows what with her weird Filipino valet houseboy who has turned her against her cuckolding military husband (Brian Keith). Keith does okay as the indulgent witness and victim of the conspiratorial bond between this female Prospero and her gay Filipino Ariel (he's fine with it as it allows him to scamper off to rendezvous in the hay with Liz).

And Brando has one great termite moment when he's about to give a lecture on Patton to his gathered cavalry cadets and suddenly the romance and resonance attached to a great cavalryman like Patton sinks into him and he almost cries right in class. For a minute it looks like his whole head is melting down like golden psychedelic spiral sludge, his eyes and lips spread out in a horizontal puddle of darkness and his lips like Donald Duck through a very gradual...  steam....   roller.

Oh Sky Masterson, if only you opened that sin mission....

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Mendacity A-Go-Go: Liz vs. the Little Monsters

 

I'll never forgive Richard Brooks for the Gaspar Noe-ish ending of LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR (1977, my review here), but his unflinching eye comes in handy when dealing with  the mythic component of Tennessee Williams, and his dispassionate objectification of Paul Newman's unnerving sexuality and Roman statue profile has a unique fetishistic kick perfectly in line with Williams' rough trade tendencies. IN CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF (1958) and in the undervalued SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH (1962), Brooks finds in Newman the gay eye candy grand prize of Williams' hard drinking man-children, then lets genius character actors bounce off the bronze.

But the big early scene in ROOF of Maggie chattering away and Brick just drinking and laying around, muttering passive-aggressive things like "Do they, Maggie?" infuriates me, every time, and keeps me from loving the film like I love NIGHT OF THE IGUANA or SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER. Newman seems neither drunk nor closeted, and Taylor seems too poised and mannered to be really in heat. By comparison, dig up the old Showtime production with Jessica Lange (above) and Tommy Lee Jones! I haven't seen it since it premiered on cable in the 80s--but I watched it a peck of times back then: a young, pre-celebrity Lange is damn hot in the negligee dress, and Jones mixes it up with Rip Torn as Big Daddy and Lang with a ferocity and cagey weariness that Newman lacks in Brooks' version.

I know it's sacrilege but Liz and Paul seem to lack connective chemistry, so it's strange to me that the long Brick-Maggie bedroom scene is the most famous and recognized part of ROOF (not so strange perhaps considering how hot Liz looks straining at the seams of her white negligee). Maybe I'm off the mark (there's also the stapled-on-by-the-code happy ending) but for me this isn't a romantic drama as much as tale of masculine redemption: Newman and Burl Ives slay me every time in the heavy showdown in the troll king basement that comes later on, and the real scene-stealer is Jack Carson when he finally lets some tears show in his voice it's such a shock and he seems so honestly frail in one moment, warts and all, that the rest of the film fades around him suddenly in a mendaciously artificial overacting haze. Fault it as you may for the now family therapy 101 moments of dialogue and symbolism (the crutch and alcohol, stairs, ice cream), it's the kind of film that holds your hand and invites you to peer--without maudlin weepiness--deep into the harrowing void of mortality the way few films have done before or since. And if you have a dad with cancer who you all call 'Big Daddy' who has a bit of a Welles or Ives gravitas then you will, like me, be devastated.

The family basement is packed with souvenirs and statues from a Cook's tour to Europe Big Daddy took with his wife, who takes after the mendacity side of the family. What could be just a cliche'd rendition of Charles Foster Kane's big ole basement becomes a mythic underworld, with Burl Ives as a kind of pot-bellied troll king, and cobwebs on tall lamps draped to resemble stalagmites. There's moments for Burl and Paul to each smash stuff in a clutching heart attack way as their illusions of immortality and glory are dashed on the altar of passing time, irrelevance, the horror of all existence, and then are redeemed, sweaty and wrecked, by the icky area they fear and recoil from the most - genuine feeling and human love.  And you know that to Williams a hypodermic full of morphine resting on a crate isn't just a symbol; it's something to drool over. Drugs don't help you escape from reality in a Williams effort, they help you confront it head on.

Wait, which reality are we talking about? Not the 9-5 family values no-neck monster reality--it helps turn down the volume on that--but the 'holy shit here comes the scythe' reality. In Williams' plays, its the whole mindless reproductive Christian-patriarchal family dynamic that's an escape from that truer, grimmer reality, the inescapable gravity of death. And if you don't make amends now, you're fucked. And incessant off-key renditions of "Dixie" are not amends. 

I've had those breakthroughs before with my own big daddy, maybe you have too -- the late night boozy moments of truth when you can look at him and suddenly see--instead of a paragon or symbol of authority--a frail, aging  human, ever trying to escape his future by ignoring his present, and you see yourself that way, too, and if alcoholism runs in your veins you can bond quite well until the hungover morning when you scarcely remember the progress you made.  Like many of Williams' plays, it seems made for me, made for a brooding drunk writer by a brooding drunk writer - with booze as the thing that both gives you the brio to stare into that void, and at the same time shorten the distance to the bottom, where the teeth are, in the base of the Sebastian's Venus fly trap garden. Click!

I wonder if the whole first half is intentionally shrill, meant to wear you down with the constant songs sung by the no-neck monsters to welcome Big Daddy home. We identify totally with Brick hiding out in the bedroom, as Taylor's Maggie rants on and on in her one-note voice. And we identify with Big Daddy when he rejects the ugly brood of Gooper for Maggie's hip convertible, and his irritation with the non-stop dinner songs which his wife makes such a show of enjoying. There's also no accident that the ROOF is in the title, as the different levels of the family estate are packed with meaning, from the elevation of the bedroom to the lowest ebb of the basement and the killing floor living room and the convertible quicksand driveway. And when the children go off to bed, and the drama starts in earnest, we above all note the the quietude like a weight removed from our shoulders when their no neck noise stops. It's that 'click.' Brick was waiting for it, and now we realize we too were waiting for it.

The rejection of messy children is one of the few things I connect with in the Apollonian, as per Camille Paglia, vs. the chthonic. Gayness has been one-note in the media since Williams' day, and thanks to PC indoctrination, gays are now the opposite of the depraved lunatics they were in the 1950s; now they're just saintly victims longing to become legally-wed adoptive parents. Either/or but on no level are homosexuals allowed to be properly ambiguous: mercurial, both good and bad, like everything else on this fucked up planet. A negative portrayal will get you a sack full of angry letters; a positive portrayal a snoozing audience and bizarre Christian right wing protests. Can you win?

Few artists today bother to try, to plumb the depths that Camille Paglia writes about in her Sexual Personae, to explore gayness as the rejection of the feminine body, the denial of procreation, involved in the Apollonian. For me and a very few others, the whole media portrayal in things like TV's American Family and The L Word are deeply offensive because they are a betrayal of all that was good and pure about the Apollonian. Now everyone's a breeder, queer eyes or no, and kids are saints by default, suffocated in round-the-clock hyper-monitoring even as their parents aren't home (they have to work overtime to afford nannies and after-pre-school sewing lessons).

In that sense it's illuminating that Brick--who may or may not have fooled around with his late pal Skipper-- is the only one to ask "why!?" in relation to Big Daddy's edict to reproduce. He has a point and it's a harrowing one: why bother to procreate just so some idiotic legacy of wealth and possessions can go on? Where's the meaning?

As someone who reacts with  mute horror to the surplus of children in my Park Slope neighborhood, I relate to Brick's question; and as someone who, because he has no kids, gets to stare into the terrifying mortal mirror without the worry being channeled into anxiety about providing for the kids after I'm gone. And as an alcoholic writer aware of the repulsion aspect of sexuality on a visceral level, I relate. And I relate to Liz's scheming to keep the no-neck monsters off that nice piece of land. Like her I want to drown them in ice cream, choke them on their own stupid toy guns..

Looking at the film in relation to Williams' other works we see a running theme of the grabby, uncouth, poor relations who breed willy nilly and are a pox upon the land with their unconscious brutishness. Against this grain, this unceasing flow of children into the future, stand a few 'whole' souls, like Maggie and Big Daddy, and Brick, Blanche, Mrs. Stone, Violet Venable, Rev. T.L. Shannon, and a boozy actress named Alexandra Del Lago.
 

God bless this old era--the late 50s-early 60s--when Tennessee Williams was as hot onscreen and stage as pocket edition Freud was in the bookstores. A time when cigarettes and whiskey made a nation more alive to the truth and ambivalent about the blind procreative drive of the future.  Maybe one day we'll again have another Tennessee Williams to steer us into some actual dialogue with our own tragic genetic imperatives; someone to have the guts to embrace the terrifying gaze of the Apollonian eye instead of just dressing them up as breeders and aping the most banal of suburban values. Til then, mendacity will remain so common as to be unnoticed, and sexual risk takers will die, whether by AIDS or Brooks' evil Tom Berenger hustlers, or terminal big daddy cancer. Won't someone not think of the children, just for a couple hours, and smoke a goddamned cigarette, or bang that shot Big Daddy doesn't seem to want, so we can talk like real adults?

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Long Live Liz

Can it be true? Has the living legend Elizabeth Taylor finally merged back into the godhead from which she came? I guess it is. I guess we'll be seeing a lot of her image in the next few days, but we don't really need to be reminded how awesome she was. She never left her throne on Hollywood's Mount Olympus, and its doubtful she ever will. Burton's probably ecstatic right now, showing her all around the spacious grounds of her new mansion on the hill.

Look at the above picture - have you ever seen a woman's eyes so aware of her sexiness yet not at all like a kitten's? How is she able to project so much knowing intellect alongside so much hotness and not have 'conflict of interest'? Her brain wattage doesn't spook us away like it might with some other actresses, neither is she being egotistical, nor condescending to the man who drools at her from behind time and space. She accepts not only her own sexuality, but ours. She was the most generous, in that and many other senses, of icons. 

Acidemic is laden with past tributes to her grace, and here's a few:

SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER:

Liz Taylor--a titanic, stunningly alive character with worldwide impact herself, seems to have been a kind of protean cine-muse to Williams, and one much more magnetic than Magnani, and much more opinionated and loud about it than most of the screen goddesses in her league. Totally unafraid to get in there and shake it in all senses of the word, from root to crown chakra (with a long pause at the hips), Liz's characters clash with patriarchy and then withdraw to fight again, like Sung Tzu says to do in ART OF WAR! Take GIANT, for example, where she maneuvers around the end zones at her newfound homeland Texas' narrow-minded patriarchal ways, and everyone of the old guard just has to put up with it. None of their usual patronizing crap works, even when she's way out of line they can't rope her in. She lets them win a hand or two, but never stops wearing them down, until they surrender like aggressive dogs to Cesar Milan in the Dog Whisperer. Like said dogs, these Texans realize they love her for her ability to be assertive without being aggressive, and she becomes the social mother conscience for all of Rich Oil Texas. She creates a new respect and admiration for the voice of dissent. It's okay to walk away having lost a fight with Liz Taylor. She'll let you win the next one.

On THE SANDPIPER:

Piper doesn't even have to be good when the chemistry between this pair is in full flow the way it wasn't in The VIPs and The Comedians. There's a great scene where Dick and Liz are gazing into each other's eyes, emoting and talking, and the wounded sandpiper that Liz saved earlier in the film comes flying in for a landing right on her head! She doesn't even flinch; she just keeps staring into Dick's eyes, and for his part, even with that sandpiper there he doesn't freak out, just stays in the scene, fixed on her gaze like a hypnotist. Then after they kiss, she reaches up and cups the bird in her hand without even looking at it, and then lets it loose, saying, "Fly away, baby," in that husky afterthought style of hers.  Was this something they shot twenty takes of, just to get that damned bird to land on her head, or was it just a lucky accident that the pro thesps seized on? I spent the whole rest of the film just admiring the perfect nonchalant stillness with which these two lovers acted out their scene with this bird standing in Liz's wild hair. Then, when she later chases her old sugar daddy-cum-rapist out of the house with a hatchet, my heart was sealed...

The Case of the Disappearing Accent: THE COMEDIANS
Liz and Dick: Acidemic's Coolest Couples #2
Hotter Little Sister Effect: GIANT

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And that's how you play get the guests: SCORE (1974)

The title above is a line from WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? (1966), delivered by Richard Burton after he demolishes the entire foundation of another couple's marriage (my review here). One thing that's nigh un-demolishable is the WOOLF itself, a great film based on a great Edward Albee play, which proved a reliable blueprint for Jerry Douglas's all-nude 1970s stage play Score, AKA No One's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, (no doubt jumping into the foamy wake of Oh, Calcutta!'s surprisingly big splash) answered Albee's titular question, at least for the pre-AIDS era. Douglas' play must have been a success because it had a film adaptation, via auteur erotique Radley Metzger, the 1972 classic SCORE.  With its discontentedly sexual quartet-takes-acid plot, the film reimagines the equations of Albee's original for the age of swinging suburbia.  This is what would happen if George and Martha were druggy bisexuals instead of bitchy drunks, and Liz Taylor went after Sandy Dennis and Burton punked out George Segal and they all got high and did poppers and Valium and god knows what else...

My main issue with softcore 1970s films, or sex movies in general, is that for some reason sex isn't sexy once its 'present' onscreen. It can be a forbidden thrill to think about, but without special skill behind the camera and maybe half a roofie chased with a quart of whiskey you may either fall asleep or find yourself having an anything-but-sexual fantasy while waiting for the soft focus and slow gropes to die away and an actual movie to appear. The 'wallpaper' camp factor lasts around ten minutes, and unless the music is good, like sitars and bongos, it can grate on your nerves, but why am I even mentioning all that when discussing Radley Metzger? He's a rare a diamond in a thorny rose bush. He's classy; he's artistic; he's a little bit mad, and smart enough to know you can put Shakespeare into smut just as easy as you can put smut into Shakespeare. 

SCORE is a gem not only in the Metzger canon but in the world of risque adult entertainment, marking a genuinely subversive high water mark above the usual lowbrow hetero-male-centric sexual rubric. It's a gay seduction film for straight men, or a bi-curious film that satisfies curiosity how other quarters halve, like a cat killer that raises cats from the dead. This is the movie that should have gone on while Elliot Gould was brushing his teeth at the end of BOB AND CAROL AND TED AND ALICE (1969). He'd have run screaming from the screen!

As the head hedonist Martha-type, Claire Wilbur is strangely reserved (she played her role originally onstage) and kind of manly, which suits the role. As the hotter younger gamin, Lynn Lowry is cat-eyed (she was 'Ruthie' in the 1982 CAT PEOPLE remake) and convincing. She seems to be really having fun and rolling along with the story wherever it may go. As her squeamish new husband, Calvin Culver is kind of too gay from the get-go to convincingly be seduced out of his straight programming, but he looks good without a shirt and has a sweet smile (sadly, he died of AIDS in 1987). Gerald Grant as the worldly, knowing Jack was in only a handful of other films: both his haircut and acting are uneven, but Metzger's tart dialogue carries him through and he seduces like he's played 'get the guests' all his life. SCORE, thou shalt score again!

Not only is this an important movie for anyone anxious to learn the ABC's of seduction strategizing, it's also a feel good movie for the gay matchmaker in us all. Many's the night I've helped counter the odds as a lesbian wingman back in the 00's. Between my hot AA lesbian sponsee and me in my peak condition, all the exits were covered. Still, that didn't mean we always caught our quarry, espec. if she was straight and sniffed out our Dangerous Liason-style game like a frightened deer. Sometimes you can turn 'em, most times you can't, but it's a great team-building exercise. Before all that, whilst still drinking, I lived in Hoboken with a hot bi swinger, and I'd feel a vested interest in her seduction stratagem as well. I'd work to keep her prey entertained but when said prey ran hurriedly off with mixed signals and tedious straightness intact to catch the midnight Path train back to Manhattan, we'd drown our collective sorrows.

Watching SCORE reminded me a lot of that, except, well, the title says it all! Path trains not an option.

So while on the one hand you are rooting for this pair to seduce this younger couple, on the other hand, 'gulp' if you are a straight male you are kind of put in the position of having to imagine all sorts of 'new sensations' which straight males are not often forced to reckon with while being too high to object and too vulnerable to being wooed and flattered by some hot hairy... shirtless... male. If you're not gay, maybe this movie will prove you wrong. And at least do your hosts the credit of inhaling some freakin' poppers before you make up your mind.

Could part of 'straight' middle America's rabid hate/fear of gay marriage and openly gay soldiers be similar to the reticence and denial of the younger couple in this film? Is it a metaphor? Or is it that our reign on our straight imaginations is so tenuous we can't help imagining acts that then freak us out and repel us sexually? We don't like to imagine our parents doing it either, for example, and generally they respect that by not talking about their sex life in our presence. Can we put two and two together and realize fear of homosexuality is fear of our own imagination, of the way we can't let mental images go, the way we become obsessed by threats that don't exist, all tied into our own conception of our primal scenery? If we don't repress our cultural gayness, in short (according to our subconscious' bundled anxiety portfolio), we may have to watch our parents have sex, and that would be horrific. Better to not be born, better to inhale our own amyl nitrate birth and exhale into a whole new self, one more open... and more opened.

All I know is, gay people who don't admit it to themselves are a misfiring piston in the roaring Chevy engines of bi-ness, straightness, and gayness. If you're always telling people the elaborate non-gay reasons you have for not having an opposite sex lover, then forget it, come out and be the best gay person in the world, rather than the lamest straight person. And then come over for dinner (in 1992) so my roommate can sleep with you! SCORE strikes again! Open up the pepper shaker and roll another number.

There is a minor issue I have with the SCORE soundtrack, particularly an obnoxiously off-key Yardbirds impression song "Where is the Girl" that repeats way too much in the beginning. But the big climax scene that's the last 20 minutes or so rocks with a funky bongo and distorted electric cello score that gets the blood racing.  Similarly, the actors are also a bit stilted in the beginning but come into their own pretty quick once that cello starts, especially cat-eyed Lowry, who taps into a kind of sensational wickedness as she begins to take some control and play along; a natural born swinger just now blossoming as the pot, pills and poppers kick in.

And of course that slow coming into their own also parallels WOOLF, wherein Burton's character starts out all old and tired and set in his set fusty history prof ways and as the night heats up and the drinks fly down, he catches fire and comes alive with wit-fueled malice. SCORE though, is in the end much nicer. Because no one is bemoaning lack of children, or being mean to one another. The games of 'get the guests' here have no malice, just a kind of refreshingly even-keeled bravado, by which husband and wife stand as well-matched opponents in a friendly game of 'turn the newbie on'. Nothing warms my heart more than seeing someone 'open up' into new realms of being... while doing weird drugs.

And SCORE's big finale climax is methodical and ingeniously edited so that when the seductors agree, each in their separate killing chambers, that midnight will be the 'game's' deadline, everything begins to heat up in crazy crosscuts, to the point of no-return right at the stroke of twelve, cooking like no one's business, until the separate seductions bleed together and the will they or won't they becomes a tied-up, twirling funhouse mirror blur of identity that rockets SCORE out of the WOOLF-ish woods and right into the rarefied air of menage-a-troisteur Donald Cammell's PERFORMANCE! 

I also love that the film follows only one 24-hour period, in these people's lives, from one hung-over morning/afternoon picking up ashtrays, spent popper tubes and flung underwear, to the next. I love those kind of parties! People sing about goin' on and on to the "breaka dawn," but don't often show it in movies. With his attention to the real-time rhtyhms of seduction and horizon-widening, Metzger shows his love not only of WOOLF but of Eric Rohmer! And drug orgies! Like the best of Rohmer's sun-dappled moral tales, the chase and the near misses become so hot with SCORE that even after hooking up or not the passion still undulates. And like all the best drug movies, the contact high is potent.

Incidentally, the stunning new DVD being released this week from Cult Epics is fully restored and uncut, which means... oh I shan't spoil the surprise. Let's just say, if you see just one 1970s uncut sex movie this semester, make it SCORE. And since this is a time for new things, my friend, just relax... relax... and when that first popper comes rushing through your brain, keep repeating "it's only a movie, it's only a movie.." being projected.. onto my tight sailor pants.

Look closer...at far right

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Coolest Couples #2: Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor

When a towering drunken genius collides with love, sometimes it's like a human torch marrying into a wet fireman's blanket. Other times it's a human torch colliding with another of equal heat, two towers of drunken balls-out badassitude that burn each other out like two candles lit on both ends, laid across so they burn waxy holes in each other's mid-sections at the same time. That was the case with Liz Taylor and Richard Burton.

Of course their life together is legend; they met on the set of CLEOPATRA (1963), their torches burning up enough money to practically bankrupt 20th Century Fox in the process (Fox had to sell off half the studio to pay for overtime).

A part of their success stems no doubt from a shared love of liquor, and this is also perhaps their demise. Booze made Liz bloated and Dick droopy-eyed, but it also made them burn twice as brightly when they were burning, as they did in films like WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF, TAMING OF THE SHREW, THE SANDPIPER. When they were fire blanketing each other out--as in BOOM!, THE VIPS and THE COMEDIANS--they were still sporadically worth watching. Somehow the more weary and hung-over they appeared, the more adult they became, sometimes stiflingly so. You can imagine watching THE COMEDIANS with your parents on TV as a kid and being bored into a coma, but if you're old enough, you can at least count the drinks and enjoy as Liz wafts in and out of her German accent.

 A book is coming out next week that incorporates a vast trove of love letters between the two stars, and paints a sometimes ugly, sometimes beautiful portrait of their relationship. Furious Love: Elizabeth Taylor And Richard Burton And The Marriage Of The Century by Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger (order it here). An abridged excerpt:

On July 9, Elizabeth flew to San Felipe, arriving while Burton was still shooting. She spent the afternoon with him on the set and later they returned to his hotel to make love.
All their old sexual fire came back, despite her recent surgery, the energy-sapping 115-degree heat and the fact that he had now gone 140 days without drinking. Her presence and her body lifted his Welsh gloom, and it was as if they had just met. The two of them devoured each other.

The following week, Elizabeth returned to Los Angeles and Richard pined for her all over again. She informed him she had lost one of her tooth caps and he wrote to commiserate, closing his letter with 'all my love. Never think of anything but you for very long. I fancy you a very lot, Shebes.  -  Rich'.

While still in San Felipe, Richard accepted a part in a low-budget thriller, Villain, to be filmed in London. Elizabeth, too, had received a film offer for Zee And Co.  -  an adaptation of Edna O'Brien's novel about a sexual triangle, to be made in London at the same time.
Richard urged her to accept it.

'Dear Long-wayaway-one,' he wrote, 'Very antisocial I am when I don't booze. And no fun when you're not around... I hope that girl's teeth are not hurting too much... are you going to do the film?

She accepted the role and they decided that, rather than fly, they would take the train from Los Angeles to New York, before boarding the QE2 for England. The train trip gave them a rare chance to be alone together for the first time in over a year.

They made love and Elizabeth giggled at what she called Richard's 'new technique,' which he insisted was simply the movement of the train swaying and rocking as it rolled down the track.
But the seeds of destruction were also planted on that train  -  for the first time in four months, Richard had a drink.

'Forgot the momentous news,' he confessed in his diary on August 2. 'I had a Jack Daniel's and soda and two glasses of Napa Valley red wine last night with dinner. Felt immensely daring and all it did was make me feel very sleepy.'

A few days later, he polished off a bottle of Burgundy and by the time they crossed the Atlantic to England and reclaimed their yacht Kalizma, Burton had slid completely off the wagon.

Elizabeth's co-star in Zee And Co. was Michael Caine, who was nervous about meeting 'a living legend' for the first time, and equally nervous about meeting Richard Burton. He had been warned that Burton's presence on the set was his way of keeping an eye on Michael, considered to be a ladies' man  -  a real-life Alfie  -  at the time.

But the truth was that Burton, drinking heavily, usually spent the afternoons sleeping on the couch in Elizabeth's dressing room. And sometimes, the tremor in his hands was so bad that, afraid of embarrassing his wife, he stayed away.

If Elizabeth was alarmed at Richard's tremors she didn't show it. Neither of them as yet considered Richard to be an 'alcoholic'. Besides, she, too, continued to drink heavily. They each needed the crutch of alcohol. The difference was that she drank to free her emotions, while he drank to numb his. (Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor: The Love Letters. How drinking cocooned them from pressure of fame. Without it, they couldn't even make love)

Man, I sure can feel that pain. Booze, like xanax, pot, or coke, gives you the world and promises more, then takes the senses away with which you would perceive that world, and instead of more offers less and less until life's just waking, baking and taking naps. While it's sharpening your wit it's dulling your speech so that poetry comes out slurs and vice versa. But who the fuck cares? Booze and drugs make you cooler. Period. So long as you don't vomit on anyone or make your mom sad by dying. At least at the time their drinking was more celebrated than openly demonized. Imagine Dick in Celebrity Rehab, or wearing one of those SCRAM ankle bracelets like Lindsay Lohan, and you realize just how lame this decade really is.

And this is not to mention their casual openness with regard to sex. Burton once cut short a poolside afternoon interview, saying "excuse me gentlemen, I have to go make love to my wife." And that's a catch phrase and a half, enough to remind a million marrieds what they got into this mess for anyway. Again such frankness was common in the more enlightened age of the 60s-70s, and Dick and Liz probably did a lot to help make it so. You couldn't get all prim and judgemental like a salacious church lady over their lifestyle, they'd lay you flat with great acting in tones so mellifluous everything they said seemed true and right. A few years ago I reviewed the Burton and Taylor boxed set, and wrote of THE SANDPIPER:

Piper doesn't even have to be good when the chemistry between this pair is in full flow the way it wasn't in The VIPs and The Comedians. There's a great scene where the two are gazing into each other's eyes, emoting and talking, and the wounded sandpiper that Liz saved earlier in the film comes flying in for a landing right on Liz's head! She doesn't even flinch; she just keeps staring into Dick's eyes, and for his part, even with that sandpiper there he doesn't freak out, just stays in the scene, fixed on her gaze like a hypnotist. Then after they kiss, she reaches up and cups the bird in her hand without even looking at it, and then lets it loose, saying, "Fly away, baby, in that husky afterthought style of hers, as she waved it off into the air.  Was this something they shot twenty takes of, just to get that damned bird to land on her head, or was it just a lucky accident that the pro thesps seized on? I spent the whole rest of the film just admiring the perfect nonchalant stillness with which these two lovers acted out their scene with this bird standing in Liz's wild hair. Then, when she later chases her old sugar daddy-cum-rapist out of the house with a hatchet, my heart was sealed... like a crypt. (Snap went the Dragon 12/08)

on THE VIPS (1960):

A couple as coolly debauched as Dick and Liz could probably not exist in the films today anyway. The power-suit and baseball cap-wearing "industry" people would probably have a hard time getting either actor to agree to product positioning and not smoking. Plus, these days it's tough getting insurance for any film starring notorious drunks, and audiences are far less indulgent and quicker to forget; there's no long-term loyalty. Liz and Dick made apparently dozens of Giglis and people dutifully came, ditto Martin and Lewis. Now those kind of loyal fans are gone and so are the boozy couples. The equivalent to the Dick and Liz pair bond today would probably be Courtney Love and Nick Nolte, if they were a couple, and maybe they should be. (The Case of the Mysterious Disappearing Accent, 12/08)

Times have changed since I wrote the above, now of course there seems to be just Lindsay... is she all alone out there? Won't some soused actor or actress come and help that lady off her feet? Til then, the first couple of drunken gravitas-pulled thesping will always be Taylor and Burton, and if they only made a few good films together and maybe if they were soberer they could have done it better, I'd say the fault is ours. When artists go that far out on a limb for us the way Dick and Liz did, we owe them something more than enough money to choke a diamond horse, we owe them material cracked enough to be worthy of their lustre, and it just wasn't there and still isn't (aside from WOOLF, a film that still startles and makes us reel from its besotted brilliance). Since there was no other material, they made art of themselves, and if their paint hardened and their livers swole like rivers, well, that's show biz. Dick would die and Liz would go on to help make rehab centers ubiquitous in our culture. But hey, for awhile they blazed, they raged, and they showed drunken America how to burn itself up like there wasn't a wet fireman's blanket in 100 miles.

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Sparagmos A-Go-Go: SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER (1958)

"Know how I'd like to die? I want to be ripped apart by wild animals" -Jerry (Annie Hall, 1977)

There are, Jerry aside, few of us who are consumed by the idea of being ripped apart and/or devoured by wild animals. What Jerry is doing with the above quote is trying to blow Annie's mind, to seduce her with his LA sexy Jim Morrison-esque chutzpah, but even the most lizard kingly of poets dreaded being ripped apart when push came to shove, and of course I'm referring to Sebastian in SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER (1958).

Incredible fear can bring with it a queasy sexy charge, if you can remember a low spinal vibration when imagining being spanked as a kid (far different than actually being spanked, mind you) then you know imagining pain has a queasy kick, for us poets especially. We can feel it always about to happen right at the corner of our psyches and in our saliva, a sense of disintegration familiar to psychedelic warriors in the temporarily bad trip way where you do often feel like you're being ripped apart by wild animals (or humans), psychically, all the time, whether by Nevada desert bats, bugs in the skin, invisible werewolf cops, Tibetan demons, wild dogs, zombies, clones, giant vagina dentatas, or in my case, angry three foot tall Japanese ghosts salarymen shaking my hand over and over like an air pump, gradually inflating me to capitalist bloat-style blimp as their hands pump mine and gradually morph into a giant phallic oil pipe javelin.. until I exploded... in the shower.

Tennessee Williams knows the feeling. You can tell in the way he blurs that sadomasochistic line between fear and desire in many of his plays; his demons precede the debauched white-faced, black leather-clad monsters of HELLRAISER by 30 years, with scenes like: the rape in STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE; the shattering final shot of ROMAN SPRING OF MRS. STONE; the (if the censors hadn't cut it first) castration of Paul Newman at the end of SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH. In Williams' world there's no such thing as a bad sensation, just peaks of crucifixion-level intensity at the climactic end of the spectrum (this is especially true through the lens of rough trade devotees).  The only truly bad sensation is the despair comes from the numbness of isolation and drifting, the fear of winding up adrift in a boat becalmed, the pain of soul when not even the birds want to peck at you. It's that despair Williams truly fears, a fear that makes the focused attention of cannibal rent boys a luxury by contrast.



Directed by Joseph Manckiewicz from Williams' original one-act play brilliantly adapted by Gore Vidal, SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER is the kind of thing that would freak people out even today, unless it was shot by George Romero or Dario Argento and all the cannibalism was actually shown, hence giving it a drive-in context. Then, somehow, it would be okay... but as it is, the film's artsy thespian stamp ensures that even the most squeamish of bourgeoisie have to see it all the way through, forced--almost like Katharine Hepburn's insane matriarch--to hear to the vicious incestuous, homosexual truth as told by Liz Taylor under hypnosis. And since it's spoken, and only related via metonym and metaphor (hands, legs, instruments, birds), the flashbacks play more like a Hitchcock or Bergman dream sequence than a traumatic reality or more to the point, it shows there is no difference.

The terrible fate of Sebastian mirrors several mythic archetypal sacrificial moments (namely Euripides' Bacchae) involving crows, youths, implied homosexuality, and ritualistic violence. Violet tries to make the "real" event in Williams' story seem a dead myth, a torture-porn fiction, rather than a living truth. But in flashbacks of washed-out poetry, our senses are blasted by the hot sight of Liz Taylor gradually releasing her gorgeous black out from under a tacky bathing cap, squirming in the surf in a revealing white bikini and inciting us into a horny cannibal frenzy (that image was the selling point of the film). The young bucks of the town that clamor against the private beach fence as they ogle her create a freakish class divide / mirror / screen dichotomy - as if these boys could be the audience around us in the theater, or rather we become them, joining the slavering nameless throng climbing over each other to get a better view!

But this is a talking cure movie and, as I say, the main horrors are spoken of not seen. First, Violet describes the spectacle of hatching day in the Galapagos and then relates it to Monty Clift's venerable shrink; Liz Taylor witnesses and reports Sebastian's own similar end for the climax. Monty Clift's job as analyst then becomes acting as witness to these women discussing the horrors of the real, the obscene existential mouth which devours itself in a churning, massive, oceanic ouroboros. Both Catherine and Violet wind up lambs in a kind of dual sacrificial ceremony, performing the horror of watching and relating a sacrifice for a (male, presumably 'civilized') audience whose reaction is meant to be one of horror, like the way female performance artist cover themselves in blood and chocolate syrup in the 1980s. It's real return of the repressed abject menstruation shit, man, and I'm not knocking it. It's a closure, redressing the sins of our hear-no-feminine-napkin-application-procedure evil forefathers. The patriarchal rep (Clift) hears the truth of the hysterical symptom (Violet's denial) and thus the scene is cured. No wonder 1950s America loved Freud! He gave both genders an out: he mediated the mounting bedroom cold war by just keeping everybody talking.

Williams' own real life sexual interests followed the Greek ideal, aiding no doubt in his profound grasp of Greek tragedy's ability to explain the cosmos in terms of Apollonian pretty boys. Sacrificed to ensure the harvest, Sebastian hovers over the action like Poe's Lenore or the dominating spirit of REBECCA. What does he look like? We don't even know, never see a picture. I, for one, visualize a mix of Oscar Wilde and Alain Delon, someone too modern for their time, and who thus we think of as straddlers of past and future. Even the title, SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER, carries a time-travel vibe, like Phillip K. Dick's sci fi book NOW WAIT TIL LAST YEAR and indicates the exact kind of transcendence of space and time.

Kim Morgan notes:

The picture has it all -- Kate Hepburn at her most evil scene chomping best, perpetual fag-hag Liz Taylor donning not only the "it" bathing suit but being the "it" woman to procure young men for her chicken-hawk, native sodomizing cousin. Insane asylums, lobotomies, creepy Venus flytrap Gothic gardens, the Galapagos Islands, cannibalization! And then there's the beautiful Montgomery Clift, post accident (I happen to think he's still gorgeous -- just broken and more vulnerable) as Liz's supportive shrink (can you imagine Monty as your shrink? Wait a second...I totally can and wish he was). The movie finds the deliciously named Violet Venable (Hepburn) as a New Orleans widow unnaturally obsessed with her "poet" son Sebastian, who died while on vacation with her gorgeous niece Catherine (Taylor). I love how impeccably formal, insanely eccentric (she comes down to greet people in an elevator and has a garden filled with monstrous plants) and downright sick this woman is; her fixation on Sebastian being Oedipal with a capital O. But pretty Catherine's thoughtful shrink Monty will get to the bottom of this poisoned well leading to the movies memorable blood-curdling scream of "Help!"

(Sunset Gun, Three Obsessions, August 5, 2008)

The whole structure of "Big Chill" kind of dramas, where the action centers around someone recently or long-since dead and therefore unseen is a big thing with Williams: Blanche natters incessantly about her long-dead lover who couldn't get it up cuz he was queer and thus shot himself in STREETCAR; Anna Magnani worships the memory of her late stud husband in THE ROSE TATTOO; Fred's dead at the start of NIGHT OF THE IGUANA, and who could forget old Skipper in CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF, but none of them can hold a candle to the evil and eloquently damned Sebastian, who for total dominance over the living is as spectral as a Poe heroine.

His mother Violet then is both Sebastian's symbolic killer and the force that kept him from harm on all the other vacations, and the force that keeps his name on everyone's lips... even in death. She's like a vampire protecting her prey from other hustlers. When Sebastian dies because it's becasue Violet's not around to save him and he forgot all the things he never learned while being under her wing when other boys were negotiating narrow streets on foot, and otherwise avoiding the painful fate of the cannibal crockpot.

Perhaps because of their own outsider statuses via homosexuality and alcoholism, Tennessee Williams and Gore Vidal could both really stare wide-eyed into the hellish morass that represents the ultimate end-game of rich jet set debauchery, the "okay let's take off the kid gloves" kind of thing involved in the real rough leather trade and all the other stuff Camille Paglia writes about. Here's an excerpt of Paglia talking about the greatness of Tennessee Williams in that regard:

If we are ever to see a revival of artistry, young film-makers must study and absorb the great movie past. To build on the small, weak, one-dimensional films of the 1980s and '90s is a dead end. The same thing with writing: if young people simply draw on the shallow, cynical, jargon-clotted postmodernism of the 1980s and '90s, they'll produce nothing that will last.

This is why I exalt Tennessee Williams as a supreme role model: he was openly gay (daring at the time) but never ghettoized himself. He lived in the real world and thought and felt in passionate, universal terms — which is why he created titanic characters who have had worldwide impact and who are still stunningly alive.

(Bright Lights Film Journal, #54, 2006)

Liz Taylor--a titanic, stunningly alive character with worldwide impact herself, seems to have been a kind of protean cine-muse to Williams, and one much more magnetic than Magnani, and much more opinionated and loud about it than most of the screen goddesses in her league. Totally unafraid to get in there and shake it in all senses of the word, from root to crown chakra (with a long pause at the hips), Liz's characters clash with patriarchy and then withdraw to fight again, like Sung Tzu says to do in ART OF WAR! Take GIANT, for example, where she maneuvers around the end zones at her newfound homeland Texas' narrow-minded patriarchal ways, and everyone of the old guard just has to put up with it. None of their usual patronizing crap works, even when she's way out of line they can't rope her in. She lets them win a hand or two, but never stops wearing them down, until they surrender like aggressive dogs to Cesar Milan in the Dog Whisperer. Like said dogs, these Texans realize they love her for her ability to be assertive without being aggressive, and she becomes the social mother conscience for all of Rich Oil Texas. She creates a new respect and admiration for the voice of dissent. It's okay to walk away having lost a fight with Liz Taylor. She'll let you win the next one.

SUMMER's Catherine isn't allowed to know this kind of power. When she parades around in negligees or bathing suits, it's both a mythic Venus on the half-shell moment and a scream for help; she wants you to see how desperately out of place she feels, bu you can only notice how perfectly in place every part of her actually is. She needs a Rock Hudson around who she can bounce off of and claw at and know he'll stick around regardless. She needs a man to see the limitless compassion and love behind all the compulsive attention-seeking. Monty Clift fits this role beautifully. One of my favorite moments is when she kisses him impulsively during their therapy and he neither rejects nor accepts to go any further, or back for that matter, saying "why not? It was a friendly kiss." He lets it affect him, but later when she grabs him and they kiss we never quite see how he responds. So many similar scenes in films blow this opportunity to dissolve phony social dualities between authority figure and lover, social order/propriety and chthonic carnal desire; the desire of the higher self and the desire of the man, as if any response other than nun-like rejection is considered amoral. Catherine's 'nymphomania' could be unknowingly encouraged to devolve into degeneracy by the nuns strictly enforced codes of shame and negative reinforcement coupled to fast profits ala BUTTERFIELD 8, so when Monty responds in this way, the chain is short-circuited and she's free. Who wouldn't go crazy if they took away your smoking privileges?


Yes, this film makes you proud to be a smoker. It's cigarettes ultimately that bond Catherine with Monty's doctor and drive the mean nun from the room. And like cigarettes, it only gets better with repeat viewings, wherein you smoke along with the action, addicted and decaying... until all the cigarettes are taken out digitally and replaced with delicious chocolate candies!

A unique film, SUMMER's only competition in whatever genre it invented is Bergman's PERSONA (1966), which similarly deconstructs the nature of art vs. recollection, image vs. verbal description, and the way image becomes truth via personally recounted testimonies of unfettered lust under blazing afternoon suns. Stories told verbally (but not seen) of unchained desire prove more arousing and dangerous than mere soft core footage shot through gauze, as it turns out, unless you're on acid maybe, but even on acid you just like it for the rhythmic breathing and colors; the image is inherently obscene to you by then anyway, it seems always about to overflow, eventually ripping open the screen to reveal the raw horror of real, of archetypal myth writ low to base animal and vegetable decay. But whereas PERSONA delves into abstract meditation and whereas something like the DEAD trilogy shows the horror of the animal and vegetable decay but skips the post-modern ripped screen artsiness, SUMMER trumps all by showing the rip AND the screen and then showing Liz Taylor describe it under a heat lamp. The result is as devastating and cathartic as a dozen art and/or horror films combined. You know how I'd like to die? Watching SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER!

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