The Next Lobotomy Room Film Club ... Butterfield 8 (1960) on 21 March 2024

“The John O'Hara novel that seemed perfect for the movies, plus the role that seemed perfect for Elizabeth Taylor - and this is the garish mess it became,” is how the reliably terse Pauline Kael dismissed Butterfield 8. “Daniel Mann's direction is maybe even worse than the Charles Schnee-John Michael Hayes script. With Laurence Harvey; Dina Merrill, doing a noble wife to end all noble wives; and a vacuum on the screen that is said to be Eddie Fisher.” 

Almost no one has a good word to say about this lurid, wildly entertaining 1960 melodrama (including leading lady Taylor herself) – so of course Butterfield 8 is absolute catnip for me and it’s the March 2024 selection for the Lobotomy Room cinema club devoted to Bad Movies for Bad People! 

To its advantage: Taylor is sublime as wanton high-priced, high-class New York call girl Gloria Wandrous (tagline: “Gloria is the glamour girl who always wakes up ashamed!”). And the script co-authored by John Michael Hayes (the genius behind camp classicks (sic) Torch Song, Peyton Place, The Carpetbaggers, Where Love Has Gone and Harlow) features dialogue like “Face it, mama! I was the slut of all time!” and “I’ve had more fun in the back of a ’39 Ford than I could ever have in the vault of the Chase National Bank!” 

The opening moments alone are spellbinding: as Edward Margulies and Stephen Rebello recount in their 1993 book Bad Movies We Love, “Taylor awakens alone in her married lover’s bed, wraps herself in only a sheet, lights a cigar, drains a glass of whiskey, discovers her torn dress on the floor, brushes her teeth with booze, finds an envelope with $250 cash, scrawls “No Sale” in red lipstick across a mirror, leaves the money and instead steals the absent wife’s mink coat, calls her answering service and hails a cab to the apartment of … Eddie Fisher (by then, he was the real life Mr. Taylor).”  

So, join us on 21 March 2024 to watch Butterfield 8 over cocktails at Fontaine’s in Dalston! In my intro, I’ll provide context on Eddie Fisher leaving his then-wife Debbie Reynolds for Taylor in 1958 (the red-hot showbiz scandal of its time) and how Taylor almost dying of pneumonia helped win her a “sympathy Oscar” for her performance in Butterfield 8 in 1961! 

Lobotomy Room is the FREE monthly film club devoted to cinematic perversity! Third Thursday night of every month downstairs at Fontaine’s cocktail lounge in Dalston. Numbers are limited, so reserve your seat via Fontaine’s website. Alternatively, phone 07718000546 or email bookings@fontaines.bar. The film starts at 8:30 pm. Doors to the basement Bamboo Lounge open at 8:00 pm. To ensure everyone is seated and cocktails are ordered on time, please arrive by 8:15 pm at the latest.

“By the odds, it should be a bomb. But a bomb it is not, let us tell you. At least, it is not the sort of thing to set you to yawning and squirming, unless Elizabeth Taylor leaves you cold. In the first place, it has Miss Taylor, playing the florid role of the lady of easy virtue, and that's about a million dollars right there. "I was the slut of all times," she tells her mother in one of those searing scenes wherein the subdued, repentant playgirl, thinking she has found happiness, bares her soul. But you can take it from us, at no point does she look like one of those things. She looks like a million dollars, in mink or in negligée. When she sits at a bar with Laurence Harvey, who is not just any Joe but a millionaire with a ten-room Fifth Avenue apartment and "caves all over town," and she lets her eyes travel up and down him, measuring not the bulge of his pocketbook but the bulge of his heart - well, all we can say is that Miss Taylor lends a certain fascination to the film. Then, too, it offers admission to such an assortment of apartments, high-class bars, Fifth Avenue shops and speedy sports cars, all in colour and CinemaScope, that it should make the most moral status seeker feel a little disposed toward a life of sin. Brandy, martinis and brittle dialogue flow like water all over the place.”  

/ Bosley Crowther reviewing Butterfield 8 in The New York Times, 17 November 1960 /

“In both Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Butterfield 8, Taylor appears in a tight white slip that looks as if it were sewn onto her body. What a gorgeous object she is! Feminists are currently adither over woman’s status as sex object but let them rave on in their little mental cells. For me, sexual objectification is a supreme human talent that is indistinguishable from the art impulse. Elizabeth Taylor, voluptuous in her sleek slip, stands like an ivory goddess, triumphantly alone. Her smooth shoulders and round curves, echoing those of mother earth, are gifts of nature, beyond the reach of female impersonators. Butterfield 8, with its call-girl heroine working her way down the alphabet of men from Amherst to Yale, appeared at a very formative moment in my adolescence and impressed me forever with the persona of the prostitute, whom I continue to revere.” 

/ From "Elizabeth Taylor: Hollywood’s Pagan Queen" by Camille Paglia, Penthouse magazine, March 1992 /

 

 

Reflections on ... Secret Ceremony (1968)

/ Italian movie poster for Secret Ceremony via /

Glittering hedonists Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton were the foremost show business power couple of the last century. (I’m sorry, but Kanye and Kim who?). As world-famous and tabloid-friendly as the tempestuous, jet-setting and hard-drinking duo were, the actual films they made together and individually during their marriage were mostly notorious mega-bombs. Some, though, were genuinely interesting and deserve reappraisal. Take, For instance, Secret Ceremony (1968).

Pop culture theorist Camille Paglia has rhapsodized about the impact of seeing Secret Ceremony on its original release. “One of the most spectacular moments of my movie-going career occurred in college as I watched Joseph Losey’s bizarre Secret Ceremony,” she would recall in her essay “Elizabeth Taylor: Hollywood’s Pagan Queen” in the March 1992 issue of Penthouse magazine. “Halfway through the film, inexplicably and without warning, Elizabeth Taylor in a violet velvet suit and turban suddenly walks across the screen in front of a wall of sea-green tiles. It is an overcast London day; the steel-grey light makes the violet and green iridescent. This is Elizabeth Taylor at her most vibrant, mysterious and alluring at the peak of her mature fleshy glamour. I happened to be sitting with a male friend, one of the gay aesthetes who had such a profound impact on my imagination. We both cried out at the same time, alarming other theatregoers. This vivid silent tableau is for me one of the classic scenes in the history of cinema.”

/ A vision in violet: via /

Seen today, peculiar London-set late 1960s psychodramas Secret Ceremony is the type of film John Waters would describe as a “failed art movie” – but that’s one of my favourite genres, and if you’re going to make a failed art movie, make it this wildly baroque, weird and claustrophobic! Screen diva Taylor (at the zenith of her zaftig double-chinned, caftan-wearing era) stars as Leonara, a blowsy middle-aged prostitute tormented by the memory of the death of her young daughter by drowning. One day profoundly disturbed and deluded poor little rich girl Cenci (post-Rosemary’s Baby Mia Farrow at her most waif-like) latches onto her and decides Leonara represents the return of her recently-deceased mother, dragging her back to her haunted art nouveau mansion in Holland Park. Leonora soon clashes with Robert Mitchum as Albert, Cenci’s sexually predatory stepfather. From there things just get progressively more twisted!

/ Elizabeth Taylor: the caftan years (albeit a caftan by Dior) /

/ Frankly psychotic nymphette Cenci. You may find Farrow's performance begins to grate as the film progresses /

Secret Ceremony keeps threatening to turn into a horror movie and never quite delivers – but it is satisfyingly jarring and gothic, nonetheless. Taylor in shrewish bitch goddess-mode is hypnotically compelling as only she can be. At one point, Leonara hungrily gobbles a big fried breakfast and loudly belches – a moment worthy of Divine! There’s a reason Taylor is revered as a campy queer icon! (Cruelly, the film repeatedly draws attention to Taylor’s matronly weight. “I’m so fat!” Leonara wails to Cenci, surveying herself in a mirror. Later, Albert tells Leonara “You look more like a cow than my late wife. No offense - I'm very fond of cows”).  The fragile and intense Farrow hams it up as a demented child-like pixie. Secret Ceremony is effortlessly stolen from them both, though, by the torpid Mitchum, who breathes complexity and humanity into the perverse role of Albert.  

/ Gruesome twosome: Albert (Robert Mitchum) and Cenci (Mia Farrow) /

/ The bathtub scene was apparently considered the hint of depravity in 1968, hinting at both lesbianism and incest /

No spoilers, but out of this freakily dysfunctional trio, only one will survive and they will mutter to themselves, “There were two mice fell in a bucket of milk. One yelled for help and drowned. The other kept pedaling around until, in the morning, he found himself on top of butter”. Watch for the closing credits, which announce Taylor’s wardrobe is via Dior and her hairstyles by Alexandre de Paris. The film is like a lesbianic, female-centred version of director Joseph Losey’s earlier, more celebrated movie The Servant (1963). Secret Ceremony almost certainly suffered at the box office by the failure of the even-more berserk Boom! (1968), the flop film based on a Tennessee Williams play Losey made with Taylor and Burton that same year - another movie I love!

Further reading:

My analysis of the other Elizabeth Taylor / Joseph Losey "failed art movie"of 1968 - the infamous Boom! - here.

The essential Dreams Are What Le Cinema is For blog goes in-depth on Secret Ceremony here.

Ultra-Belated But Heartfelt Tribute to Elizabeth Taylor

I know she died way back in March, but:

1) Has anyone ever given the finger with such style and conviction?



2) Or applied eye shadow (and clicked on a pair of sunglasses) with such bug-eyed intensity?

What a woman!