A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

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Friday, August 8, 2025

The Sandpiper (Vincente Minnelli, 1965)

Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in The Sandpiper

Cast: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Eva Marie Saint, Charles Bronson, Robert Webber, James Edwards, Torin Thatcher, Tom Drake, Douglas Henderson, Morgan Mason. Screenplay: Martin Ransohoff, Irene Kamp, Louis Kamp, Dalton Trumbo, Michael Wilson. Cinematography: Milton R. Krasner. Art direction: George W. Davis, Urie McCleary. Film editing: David Bretherton. Music: Johnny Mandel. 

Cynically concocted by its producer, Martin Ransohoff, as a vehicle for Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton at the peak (or nadir) of their celebrated relationship, The Sandpiper steals its dialectic from the hoary old Somerset Maugham tale of Sadie Thompson and the missionary. Ransohoff set a team of writers, including former blacklistees Dalton Trumbo and Michael Wilson, to work on fleshing out his idea to tell the purloined story of a free-spirited woman and an uptight male. The best the writers could do was to lard the story with glitzy profundities, e.g. "Man is doomed by his myths" or "Man is essential to any concept of the universe" or "Saints tend to be myopic, whereas the atheist is almost always innocent." Burton looks especially uncomfortable mouthing lines like "I cannot dispel you from my thoughts," and Taylor has to say things like "Life always flies back to life if it isn't penned in." We get some relief from the tedious course of the plot, which anyone can see coming almost before the movie starts, with some lovely shots of the scenery at Big Sur. Otherwise, The Sandpiper doesn't even offer the delight of camp, since its stars are so uninterested in the story that they don't even bother overacting. 

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