Born to be Childless

(Note: Spoiler Alerts)
Oh what a difference sobriety (and age) makes. Seeing Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf on the big screen while not drunk (for the first time) has helped me see that beneath the film's boozy bravado is the terror of living life as a childless couple, growing old without children to block the vanishing point on the Grim Reaper's scythe swipe horizon. Taylor and George Segal have the 'animal magnetism' - the drive to claw your way up the orgasm-dancing spasm ladder - while Dennis and Burton play solo games of "peel the label" as the drunken dreamers (Dennis is already deeply sunk into the game before Segal catches on). Dennis' hysterical pregnancy mirrors Burton's murderous telegram (examples of 'kill your darlings' editorial ruthlessness-essential for good writer, terrible for a social animal trying to get ahead). Taylor is ferocious, Segal smug and bewildered, but Dennis is irrepressible, her innocent, booze-fueld bulimic-alcoholic (bucolic) mania the upward flip side of Burton's booze-fueled depression. I'd love to see a two-handed gender neutral version where the same actor plays both Burton and Dennis' parts, and the other Taylor and Segal's. Think about it, Wooster Gruppe!


I'm childless myself, and feel blessed I've never let myself get misty about it. One regrets either decision, as Socrates would say. If we regret now (young parents unable to get any sleep, peace or privacy while childless couples run wild and free), we don't regret it later (dying alone, undiscovered 'til the neighbors smell the corpse, like poor Yvette Vickers) but that's show biz. Divorced, better, best and bested, I know lots of other childless folks and we all struggle with it as we pass "the point of no return" Of course it's different for guys, but still... It's a little more acceptable now, but still... for dear old George and Martha, having no doubt married in the conservative 1950s, it has to be a bit of a sore spot, hence the creation of their imaginary child, the little bugger (though they keep it to themselves). And yet, just as the bugger is imaginary, so too is the ominous specter of the furred and fanged Woolf (pictured left) who looms over the film like an ominous towering menace.

If this blog entry seems a little whacked, forgive me. It's soggy and warm outside and after a stretch of biting cold, my body is reeling in a cosmic puppy dance of uncertainty and emotional ping-pong. Such spontaneous, seemingly off the cuff--even cheeky--ramblings seems only too pertinent when attempting to discuss such a sprawling masterpiece as Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, wherein great gobs of mythopoetically psychohistorical insight come ripping across the screen in torrents, braying and guzzling, melons bobbling, trailing clouds of booze exhaust. In the newest DVD transfer, things are so sharp and clear you can see the spittle in her mouth. Wait, did I say that already? You can see Blonde on Blonde hanging on the wall in their house and Another Side of Bob Dylan hanging at the inn. Was that a thing or did the set decorator have a Dylan crush? It was the season. Have I been repeating myself again? Hannah? Hannah? Oh yeah, Hannah is in Night of Iguana! (pictured at right). Life's a half-familiar song a drunken fiddler plays / staggering merrily along / crooked alleyways.

I wish there were more films with dialogue by Albee or Williams - playwrights, y'know? These were men who knew how to find the nuggets of truth and wisdom amidst the leavings of their rampaging drunken demons. Writers can't get that high anymore thanks to smoking bans and, I hate to say it, the fact that most such drunk playwrights are now British and they've done too much ecstasy in the 90s to think as clearly --they shall be nameless, the bobbleheads ('hic').

But even if we only had this one work, no matter how much tripe the Taylor-Burton pair bond may have served up in their onscreen time together, they'd always be forgiven, and rightly. Even if Woolf was the only film they ever made, they would deserve the undying reverence of the true king; not bourgeois grant-bestowing style reverence, m'lord, but mud in the grindstone gears earth mother reverence, the kind that lasts long after the last piece of bourgeois grant-funded piece of highbrow conceptual PC abstract environmentally conscious inert 'art' has faded into nothing but a tiny line on a very long and 'safe' CV.

Liz and Dick made one more film based on a great battle-of-the-drunk-sexes plays-Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew, and they should have done many more. Instead they did some serious crap (The Comedians, The VIPs) decent camp (Dr. Faustus, Boom! and The Sandpiper) and called it a day. Surely that's better than nothing Films are immortal and sometimes anamorphic, kids just get uglier, and then morph blurrily into teenagers. What if you have a son and it grows up... you know, drinking bergen? Hazmat crew, take me away!

PS - Liz and Dick did have a kid in real life, Liz Todd Burton, born 1957 - but we're not talking about them-them, you know what I mean - we're talking George and Martha, and the eternal Liz/Dick archetype of battling boozers - I shudder to think if there really was a 'little bugger' - what a mess s/he'd be. 

Snap, went the dragon! THE SANDPIPER (1965)

I've finished off the last two films in the new Taylor Burton set: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? which I realized last night that I'd never seen before sober (I've seen it 10-20 times but never knew how it ended) and The Sandpiper - which I'd never seen at all, except in a Mad magazine parody I read as a kid, which made it seem exquisitely dull; jokes no doubt sailed over my head, but I judged it a dull movie about some priest and free spirit, with lots of talk along the shore and nary a single shark. When it came on TV occasionally, I looked away.

Turns out Mad needn't have bothered warning me off, because Sandpiper is pure hilarity - a camp masterpiece that could only have come out right before the summer of love, when beatniks were in vogue (as opposed to 'hippies'). And  it is beautiful to look at. I can imagine being bored by it on pan and scan TV in faded colors, but the DVD is amazing - full widescreen anamorphic with eye-popping colors and plenty of time and space to use them. If, like me, you consider driving through the winding treacherous cliff highway (101) curves or Big Sur to be the pinnacle of California dreaming, then you can finally unpack your duffel and book a room with the Piper. Director Vincente Minnelli makes fine poetic use of every crashing wave but adds other 'percs' as well, including the most highbrow camp dialogue I've personally ever heard. And I've heard (the) Boom!

Co-scripted by the great Dalton Trumbo, the story puts single free-spirit beatnik painter Taylor against married-repressed parochial school reverend Burton for the soul of Taylor's young wild child boy. Taylor wants to keep the lad pure and unsullied by the system, i.e. illiterate and antisocial, but Burton and the authorities know that at some point every boy needs to get away from his mother and go to school, lest he wind up like Norman Bates, or worse.  Of course, Dick and Liz fall in love in between their child pop psychology-themed, surf crescendo-timed, Big Conversations. That's a given. But that he has a gorgeous wife like Eva Marie Saint--trying here to seem sexless --as if she ever could--makes it hard for a straight dude to understand why a 'good' man like priest Burton would prefer this unkempt (even slovenly) 'broad' of the sea. Maybe I'm prejudiced (Eva looks like my Swedish mom did back in the 70s) but damn! Beatniks, man. Know what I mean. 

Taylor, for her part, already has a lover in the form of sculpted sculptor Charles Bronson, who wears very thin shirts and beach pants in order for you to better see all the sinews in his amazing body, and smell the peak animal magnetism. Is Taylor out of her mind to prefer some self-hating dissolute man-of-the cloth, even if Burton's voice is more mellifluous?

Personally I'd rather see Eva Marie Saint and Bronson hook up and run amok and leave the drifting Burton-Taylor discourses to heaven, but that's show biz. 

Ah, but the colors! There's a huge vase of flowers dead center in Taylor's cliff-side beatnik bungalow overlooking the sea that's to die for. Minnelli, and DP Milton Krasner, and whomever authored the DVD, really make the colors on that bouquet POP. And though the Burton-Taylor chemistry isn't at its full battling bacchanal beauty, it's still pretty amazing. They know not to get all diva difficult for a major player like Minnelli. And if you want an idea of what constitutes giftedness with actors, compare the work Taylor and Burton do for Minnelli's Sandpiper and Mike Nichols' Woolf vs. their rather tepid, disinterested efforts in the other films of the set - The VIPs and The Comedians. It's the difference between night and day, or night and later that night, after the booze has made them repetitive and bleary-eyed.

Clearly Minnelli and Nichols both big names themselves, took the time to access and cajole the best from their stars, while the other lesser-known directors no doubt let their star couple's titanic alcoholic ego-romance dive detours tank their films' momentum as thoroughly as it tanked Cleopatra.

Piper doesn't even have to be good when the chemistry between this pair is in full flow: there's a great scene where the two are gazing into each others' eyes, emoting and talking in the bungalow around that giant vase. The wounded sandpiper (symbolism!) that Liz saved earlier in the film comes fluttering in landing right on Liz's head!  You'd think someone would yell cut or break character, but Liz doesn't even flinch! She just keeps staring into Dick's eyes, and-- for his part, even with that sandpiper there--maybe about to shit on her head, who knows?-- he doesn't freak out, just stays in the scene, lost in her eyes like a hypnotist. It's a magical moment, not even a ripple of shock or discomfort is noticeable.

Then after they kiss, Liz reaches up and cups the bird in her hand without even looking at it, and then lets it loose, saying in that languid half-to-herself Taylor style: "fly away, baby." 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 they 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, later, when she chases ex-sugar daddy-cum-rapist Robert Webber out of the house with a hatchet, my heart was sealed. This movie rocks!

Yes, queen

Nonetheless I love what old Walter Chaw at Film Freak Central has to say:

it could've been an early and sharp indictment of the hippie culture instead of this relic of its brief vogue. (It's Myra Breckinridge in every way that matters--and if it's better, that's only because Rex Reed isn't in it.) When Laura goes off on an extended rant about the goodness of "The Natural," you cast a critical eye over her inch of pancake makeup and mascara, her endlessly-teased perm, and her carefully-organized collection of poly-blends, and wonder what anyone could've been thinking. Neutering Burton's force-of-nature virility (see how Burton-as-holy-man/rebel burns in Becket and especially Night of the Iguana) doesn't help the cause of Romanticist physical frankness--they would've done better switching the casting, putting Burton in the wild and Taylor in a straitjacket.

Mr. Chaw, that shit is stone cold hilarious and on point, but please don't dis a lady's lip rouge; chicks can espouse naturalism while smeared in make-up all they want - it's called third-wave feminism and it's a stone gas. I mean it's gone, daddio. Of course, I love Myra Breckenridge too. And Reed becomes Raquel fast enough that he's never too much of a dead weight (though a thousand curses on the director for not letting Welch play Myron, which was the whole reason she signed on- Andrew Sarne should be soundly thrashed and put on a raft adrift in the Devil's Triangle) and it's got Mae West singing "Hard to Handle" in front of greased-down muscle boys. Like Candy, it's so nearly great you're almost tempted to rent Sextette afterwards, but don't. Dear God, please don't. Boom! will do just as well, or if you're really brave, Dr. Faustus. She's woefully miscast, but when she drags him down to hell all painted green, you realize goddamn, maybe the pulpit is preferable to decadence. Just maybe, though. Let's not get crazy.

The Case of the Disappearing Accent: THE COMEDIANS (1967)

One thing I love about Elizabeth Taylor is how she can both coast and transcend her craft in a single scene. I've been watching the "other" films that come in the Taylor/Burton boxed set (the ones that aren't Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) and, man, what a generally tepid lot they are. Liz and Dick seem to saving their sparks for offscreen, if they had any left at the time. Sometimes there are still blazing brilliant flashes of the Liz we all love from Woolf, Suddenly Last Summer, and Giant. Sometimes she just seems zonked halfway to Hell. And Burton fares even worse: there's just sputtering fumes. Was he saving his energy for Doctor Faustus (also '67), his big directorial debut (and directorial swan song)? If so he coasted there too, acting-wise, though that film is nicely lurid and atmospheric, and colorful like a Bava AIP horror film.

Hell, it's not just for Faust and hangovers anymore. Heaven neither - I've seen Woolf a zillion times and--along with their version of Taming of the Shrew--have come to see it as the "true life" story of Dick and Liz, the snapshot from the drunken heights of that dynamic duo of titanic love. Taming isn't in the set, and with the exception of The Sandpiper, all the others, Comedians and VIPS, are the bleary morning-after versions from Woolf's wild drunken glorious night. They're the blearily hung-over Dick and Liz who collapsed the bloated studio system with their initial bloated collaboration, Cleopatra (1963) and were now rampaging through Europe. Europe doesn't know what hit them. That's some bloating power.

What was left, after all that? In The VIPS (also 1963), aka Grand Hotel while waiting for delayed flights in at the VIP lounge at Heathrow International Airport, not a lot. In fact it seems like the film hasn't even happened. It seems like the screenwriter snuck off to look for a different career and forgot to tell the actors. Alone or in pairs they wander through the actual air terminal and cavernous sets in search of love, directorial cues, and highballs... What they find is themselves, and obsequious airport receptionists.

A couple as openly debauched as Dick and Liz could probably not exist in films of our age 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/or not smoking. Plus, these days it's tough getting insurance for any film starring notorious drunks, and audiences are far less indulgent, and have quit smoking and drinking and telling lewd stories or at any rate laughing at them and enjoying feel dominant. Liz and Dick made apparently dozens of Giglis and Shanghai Surprises but people dutifully came (anything, maybe, to get away from the kids for a few hours). 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. Can you imagine it? And to have them in not just one disastrous film but dozens, with maybe one or two hits amongst the dross? That would be so great.

Alas, poor Nick and Courtney wouldn't have a Chinaman's chance finding roles together in our less enlightened times. The 'bond' wouldn't go through. Recall that Courtney had to give daily urine tests to the insurance company stooges to play Woody Harrelson's junky wife in People Vs. Larry Flynt. Which yes, makes no sense. Here the author sighed heavily, as some PC thug immediately called him to task for saying Chinaman.

I've seen two of the films in this set in a row this week, The VIPS and 'love in the time of Haitian Revolution' romantic potboiler, The Comedians (1967), and I've grown unfathomably weary. In their romantic scenes together in Comedians--which apparently are the "meat of things" as far as box office allure--Dick and Liz have all the burning chemistry of two gin-soaked carpets (not enough to  flammable). Burton usually sways or stands still and glowers under his baggy Welshman eyes; Liz angles her good side, emotes, sucks it in, flashes her cleavage and hopes for the best. Its all very adult, in the way that made adult synonymous with boring. One waits, in vain, for some of the fierce gutsy braying and brawling that makes Woolf and Shrew so endlessly rewarding. Instead it feels like Dick and Liz are waiting too, standing in line in front of you in the line for the 9 PM show, bickering and making up and keeping you irritated but diverting boredom while you wait to be seated. But it's not the show itself. and after an hour of waiting and hearing Dick and Liz bicker in front of you, you grow so suffused with world-weary ennui you give up and just go home, too jaded and bummed to even ask for a refund at the box office. Hey, that's okay with them. The Haitians are only too happy to escort you to the airport, and Liz and Dick can't wait to creep off to their air-conditioned hotel and collapse.

But, I almost forgot: what IS rare and precious in The Comedians is that Liz is working a German accent! It sounds more French than German, but Liz... with an accent! My ears perked up when I first realized she wasn't just doing a "character doing an accent" like the mannered way Martha might say "What a dump!" in Woolf.  It's subtle, and legit, and it's unmistakable. The first scene with Dick, meeting after he gets off the flight to Haiti-- her accent is sensational, mein herr! Later, it falls off a bit. She forgets she's doing one, then she picks it up where it left off, like an only mildly engaging book. But by then it's long been apparent that whatever fun Dick and Liz are having has moved off-screen, and the accent went with them. Did Burton forget he was allowed to smile? He cloaks his hangover in a smoke-yellowed veil of adult gravitas, like any 60s dad who's given up trying to be a good husband and parent and resigned himself to his easy chair, his Larks, and his highballs, like me dear old dad... once he realized the 80s wasn't going to go away on its own.

Ah, but 1967 - year of my own birth and this film's release, that was a time. Easy Rider hadn't yet wiped the frozen martini smirk off Hollywood's stupid face. The last breath out of the pre-Easy star-studio system was still on inhale, for the last time. 

Films like Comedians weren't so much a last gasp but a long drunken smoker's wheeze. And for all that, Liz and Dick still got more class than all of New Hollywood put together. Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf? Those industry dorks in their baseball caps and crew jackets, that's who, or they ought to be. If Burton were alive today, there'd be some "Get the Guests" games playing out west, and no mistake.

Alas, he's not, and the best part of the Comedians turns out to be Lililan Gish, who has a few great scenes going ballistic on the sunglassed thugs of Papa Doc. God bless little children. They abide. And they are not hung. 

(over).

Blocked by the Belle

I've been in a deep post-thanksgiving malaise, unable to write and everytime I turn around I'm remembering this weird scene from Luis Bunuel's BELLE DU JOUR (1967).

In it, our frigid would-be masochistic love slave, Severine (Catherine Deneuve) has been trying to warm up to the clients at the brothel where she's working during the afternoon, but so far no luck. She responds when they get rough, but then they back up and can't figure her out. So she can't quite get past her frigidity until the arrival of a strange, portly Asian man, played by Iska Kahn. This guy first shows her some weird box, that buzzes, and we never see what's in it. Kimberly Lindbergs at Cinebeats has some keen insight about it being a device imagined by the Marquis de Sade... but it's a pretty disturbing concept (Kimberly is more comfortable discussing it probably because she's not a guy).


Then he starts ringing a small bell, extending his arm out far from his ear, but intently listening to the chiming, his ear cocked comically to one side. Is he chasing the evil spirits out of the room? What's that bell about? All we know is, it amuses Severine. We actually see her smile, trying not to laugh, for the first time in the film. She brushes the bell away and puts her arms around this strange Asian man, in a mix of comradeship and affection.

The next time we see her, she's looking quite ravished. the maid comes in and offers her some solace, she sees blood on the sheets.  Severine doesn't want to hear it; she's lolling in debased contentment. "What do you know about it?" she asks.  She's found her delirious "Severine, your servant, comes in bells please don't forsake him" surrender.

Perhaps the bell is part of the De Sade canon of toys as well, hence the aforementioned line from the Velvet Underground's Venus in Furs, my all-time favorite song. Velvet Underground & Nico came out in 1967. Belle du Jour came out in 1967, and I came out in 1967. Together, the three of us were a dark counter-offer to the dawning hippy free love establishment. But even so, why does this scene stick in my mind in particular? The mixture of goofiness and sexuality? There might be some S/M connotation to all the weird boxes and bells, but if so, Severine is not afraid, only amused, her smile as enigmatic as the Mona Lisa's.

It would fit one of my theories about people with sexual hang ups being more "comfortable" with lovers of different races... the same way any repressed national culture is more open to radical ideas if they come from a foreigner (Hendrix in London, Picasso in Paris, Jane Campion in Australia, for example). This is all based on repression and our universal self-hatred, as when a parent is more likely to trust a complete stranger than their own child. Is that it? So is this a sign I should move to Berlin, where I imagine an artist of my unique stature might be respected instead of reviled? Who knows, maybe it's just the ringing of that infernal bell... Belle du jour!