List Price: $19.98 Our Price: $15.98YOU SAVE $4!
Buy it
DVD Butterfield 8
"I was the slut of all time!" declares Elizabeth Taylor in the role for which she won her first Academy Award®. Taylor plays Gloria, a model of loose morals who discovers a last chance at love and redemption when she spends a week with Weston Ligget (Laurence Harvey), a man who married into money and hates himself for it. They fall in love, but before they can find happiness they have to overcome their own worst natures. BUtterfield 8 (named after Gloria's answering service) is a big boozy melodrama, full of gorgeous clothes, catty comments, and emotional showdowns--but along the way it plumbs some genuine sadness. No one can be simultaneously overblown and utterly sincere like Elizabeth Taylor; the movie is mired in the morality of the time, but her performance makes Gloria's mixture of grief and anger seem immediate and genuine. --Bret Fetzer
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!
"I loved it - every awful moment of it, I loved!"
"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!"
Liz Luscious in Glossy, "Racy" Melodrama
"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!
Elizabeth Taylor has never been sexier than as Tennessee Williams's hot-blooded Maggie "The Cat" Pollitt, prowling around her boudoir in a slinky white slip. That's how you know her alcoholic, ex-football-player husband, Brick (Paul Newman), must have more than just his leg in a cast. It's the 65th birthday of wealthy (but dying) southern patriarch Big Daddy (Burl Ives), and his sons Gooper (Jack Carter) and Brick have come to suck up to him for $10 million in inheritance money. Gooper is a family man and father to a brood of "no-neck monsters"; youngest boy Brick is papa's favorite (as if you couldn't tell from the fellow's names), but hasn't sired progeny. Maggie is definitely in heat, but Brick refuses to sleep with her because he suspects her her of being unfaithful with his best... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Elizabeth Taylor - Paul Newman - Burl Ives Director(s): Richard Brooks DVD Release Date: Released the 19 September 2000 Usually ships in 24 hours
List Price: $19.97 Your Price: $15.98YOU SAVE $3.99!
Buy it
This black-and-white film adaptation of Tennessee Williams's Southern gothic play is perhaps more famous for the rumored off-screen shenanigans of its stars than for its over-the-top repressed sexuality (only Williams could pull off that paradox, and pull it off he does). Supposedly, stars Katharine Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor battled for screen time; Hepburn warred very publicly with director Joseph Mankiewicz; and a postaccident Montgomery Clift relied heavily on painkillers and support from friend Taylor during the grueling shoot. Even this, however, cannot top the events of the film itself, revolving around the unseen playboy Sebastian and his mysterious death, which has something to do with young boys, a decadent European vacation, and Taylor in a provocative wet, white bathing... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Elizabeth Taylor - Katharine Hepburn - Montgomery Clift Director(s): Joseph L. Mankiewicz DVD Release Date: Released the 15 August 2000 Usually ships in 24 hours
List Price: $24.95 Your Price: $22.46YOU SAVE $2.49!
Buy it
George Stevens won an Oscar for his 1951 adaptation of Theodore Dreiser's novel An American Tragedy, though the film seems a little overwrought today and even self-parodying at times. Still, Montgomery Clift's performance as a poor lad so drawn to a rich, beautiful girl (Elizabeth Taylor) that he contemplates killing his lower-class fiancée (Shelley Winters) is powerful, sympathetic, and mesmerizing. Taylor makes a strong impression, but Winters is awfully good in the less-glamorous role. The tone of the film is oppressive--the film doesn't exactly breathe with possibility--but there are lots of good reasons to give this movie a visit. --Tom KeoghMore Info about this DVD Actor(s): Montgomery Clift - Elizabeth Taylor - Shelley Winters Director(s): George Stevens DVD Release Date: Released the 14 August 2001 Usually ships in 24 hours
List Price: $29.99 Your Price: $26.99YOU SAVE $3!
Buy it
This silky smooth film noir pits gruff police detective Dana Andrews, stiff and blunt in his street-bred manners, against a cultured columnist and acidic wit (Clifton Webb at his prissiest) in a battle of wits during a murder investigation. The cop is a romantic hiding under a hard-boiled exterior who falls in love with the beautiful victim through the portrait that hangs in her apartment. Gene Tierney, whose heart-shaped face mixes the exotic with the girl next door, brings the poise and calm of a model to her role as the object of every man's gaze and the target of a killer. Laura, handsomely shot in dreamy black and white, is the first and best of Otto Preminger's cool, controlled murder mysteries. In the gritty world of film noir it remains the most refined and elegant example... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Gene Tierney - Dana Andrews Director(s): Rouben Mamoulian - Otto Preminger DVD Release Date: Released the 15 March 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
List Price: $14.98 Your Price: $8.98YOU SAVE $6!
Buy it
After his successful direction of the Broadway hits Barefoot in the Park and The Odd Couple, Mike Nichols made his filmmaking debut with this outstanding and still-powerful screen adaptation (by Ernest Lehman) of Edward Albee's taboo-shattering play. In their fourth film together (and by far their finest), Richard Burton and Oscar winner Elizabeth Taylor play a New England couple whose marriage hangs by a thin thread of self-deception, vicious verbal jousting, and embittered mutual need. George Segal and Sandy Dennis (who also won an Oscar) play the younger, unsuspecting couple who awkwardly witness the devastating rivalry of their hosts. Handling adult themes with intelligence and forceful dramatic impact, this was the film that finally shattered Hollywood's self-censoring... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Elizabeth Taylor - Richard Burton Director(s): Mike Nichols DVD Release Date: Released the 18 May 1999 Usually ships in 24 hours
List Price: $19.98 Your Price: $15.98YOU SAVE $4!
Buy it
