Movie Review: The Mirror Crack'd (1980)

Genre: Crime Mystery  

Director: Guy Hamilton  

Starring: Angela Lansbury, Rock Hudson, Elizabeth Taylor, Kim Novak, Tony Curtis, Edward Fox, Geraldine Chaplin  
Running Time: 105 minutes  

Synopsis: It's 1953 in rural England. American film director Jason Rudd (Rock Hudson) is in town to prepare for his next movie, featuring a big comeback role for his troubled wife Marina (Elizabeth Taylor). Marty Fenn (Tony Curtis) is the producer, and his wife Lola (Kim Novak) is Marina's nemesis. When a local woman is murdered by poison at the estate where Jason and Marina are residing, local woman Jane Marple (Angela Lansbury) and her nephew Inspector Craddock (Edward Fox) investigate.

What Works Well: In her few scenes, Angela Lansbury is a dotty delight, and Rock Hudson brings a welcome sturdiness to the otherwise over-animated cast. The quaint English village setting is idyllic, while Elizabeth Taylor and Kim Novak exchange sharp barbs as lifelong rival actresses not afraid to wish each other the worst.

What Does Not Work As Well: The murder victim is an annoying nobody, and Miss Marple is sidelined in her own movie, the bland Craddock leading most of the detective work. Taylor, Novak, and Tony Curtis, all near their career twilights, lean towards exaggerated theatricality. Director Guy Hamilton errs on the side of too many red herrings and not enough real clues, but regardless, the murderer is not hard to guess. This is a weaker Agatha Christie story (despite being based on an actual tragedy that befell actress Gene Tierney), and translates to a limp cinematic effort.

Key Quote:

Lola (to Marina): And I'm so glad to see that you've not only kept your GORGEOUS figure, but you've added SO MUCH to it!

All Ace Black Movie Blog reviews are here.

Movie Review: A Place In The Sun (1951)

A romantic tragedy, A Place In The Sun explores the promise and pitfalls of the American Dream through the story of a man intent on ascending from rags to riches.

Brought up poor by missionary parents, penniless George Eastman (Montgomery Clift) arrives in the city dominated by the Eastman business of his uncle Charles (Herbert Hayes). Put to work on the bathing suit assembly line to learn the ropes, George catches the eye of production worker Alice Tripp (Shelley Winters). They start a romance, despite strict rules forbidding the Eastmans from liaising with lowly workers.

It's not long before Alice is pregnant and leaning on George to fund an abortion or get married. But his attention has shifted. Now in a more senior role at work, he is mesmerized by wealthy socialite Angela Vickers (Elizabeth Taylor) and they are soon madly in love. She introduces him to her parents and the countryside elites, and he appears close to being accepted as a member of the influential class. But the increasingly desperate Alice represents a serious obstacle, and George starts to consider drastic solutions.

An adaptation of the 1925 novel An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser, A Place In The Sun is an elegantly mounted and torrid drama. Producer and director George Stevens, working from a script by Michael Wilson and Harry Brown, seeks the passionate, sometimes tortured, drive for success within an initially humble man, drawing out a hardening resolve to ditch the past and embrace the glittering symbols of success.

This is a representative story of a nation's pursuit of happiness, but George does not invest the effort to earn his shot at success. Promoted because of the family name, he does little to justify advancement. Indeed, he struggles to hold a conversation or even look comfortable, his deep-rooted sense of inferiority forged by a difficult upbringing. 

George's desire for betterment is ignited by an infatuation that turns to love, and it helps that Elizabeth Taylor, all of 17 at the time of filming, creates in Angela Vickers an alluring woman and welcoming gateway to a different future. The perfect anti-dote to Montgomery's haunting performance filled with physical discomfort and emotionally awkward despondency, Taylor's Angela represents the promise of leisure, horseback riding, motorboat frolicking and cocktail parties, a world apart from where and how George grew up.

But his luggage is heavy, both in terms of the hesitancy in his soul and the consequences of his ill-considered affair with Alice, now a full fledged albatross around his neck. In the final act the drama extends into the courtroom, Stevens exploring what it means to be guilty and the sharp lines always safeguarding the rich and discarding wannabes to a fate defined by character flaws.

The black and white cinematography courtesy of William C. Mellor is stellar, and Stevens deploys soft dissolves and superimposed imagery to bore into George's psyche. Some of the stylistic touches are groundbreaking, including an isolated radio on a pier broadcasting grim news while the rich enjoy their motorboat fun.

Some are born into A Place In The Sun, others earn it, but most pretenders struggle to escape the anonymity of the shadows.



All Ace Black Movie Blog reviews are here.

Movie review: Cleopatra (1963)

A mammoth historical epic, Cleopatra is a mind-numbing and emotionally frigid four hours filled with grand sets, numerous colourful costumes and endless but hollow spectacle.

Julius Caesar (Rex Harrison) chases his defeated rival Pompey to Egypt, where he quickly gets embroiled in the raging civil war over control of the throne between the immature Ptolemy and his conniving but alluring sister Cleopatra (Elizabeth Taylor). Keen to re-establish stability to ensure the continued flow of natural resources from Egypt, Caesar sides with Cleopatra. She has grander plans, and proceeds to seduce Caesar and bear his child with ambitions for them to jointly rule the world.

Cleopatra makes the grandest of entrances on a state visit to Rome, during which she catches the eye of Caesar loyalist Mark Anthony (Richard Burton). But Caesar's ascension to absolute power is rudely interrupted on the Ides of March, forcing Cleopatra to retreat to Egypt. Rome is plunged into a civil war from which Mark Anthony and Caesar's appointed successor Octavian (Roddy McDowall) emerge victorious. Mark Anthony arranges a meeting with Cleopatra to re-establish ties, triggering a steamy affair as again she plots to expand her powers through the art of seduction.

One of the most troubled and expensive productions in Hollywood's colourful history, Cleopatra almost bankrupted 20th Century Fox. No shooting script, a change in filming location from England to Italy, a change in director with Joseph L. Mankiewicz taking over from Rouben Mamoulian, and extensive delays caused by Elizabeth Taylor falling severely ill resulted in an out-of-control fiasco.

But all the public cared about were reports of a scandalous on-set affair between Taylor and Richard Burton, both married to others at the time. Cleopatra became a must-see event for the notoriety of its stars, and despite ending the year as the box office champion, it still lost enormous amounts of money due to the massive (at the time) $33 million production cost.

After a post-production process during which he was fired and then re-hired (the script only existed in his head), Mankiewicz delivered a 6 hour cut and pleaded for the release of two separate three-hour films: Caesar And Cleopatra to be followed by Anthony And Cleopatra. Aware of public desire to see Taylor and Burton together immediately, the studio insisted that Mankiewicz deliver one four-hour film.

The result is a bloated mess. Extraordinarily talkative and exhaustively long, the film lumbers forth sometimes incoherently at a plodding pace. Characters come and go sometimes at random, important events appear to be skipped entirely or barely explained, characters are vacuous, and the few action scenes consist of colossal build-ups followed by limp and clumsy execution.

What survives are the lavish sets that serve as backdrops to all the talking, and the parlour game of Taylor changing outfits (and especially wigs and hairdos) every few minutes. For followers of fashion, hairstyles and cleavage, there is always something to see, and on a few occasions the film gets distracted with circus-like interludes, dancers, performers, and general merriment taking over the screen and killing off whatever narrative momentum may have been building.

With creaky and overwrought lines of dialogue, Cleopatra's seductive powers and the passion between her and two powerful men never make it onto the screen. The loosening of censorship restrictions allowed Mankiewicz to ensure Taylor and her maidens are always alluring, but then the talking kicks in and any sense of enticement and adoration is lost in the suffocating verbiage.

With the exception of Rex Harrison, the performances are best described as vacant. The actors don't appear invested in what just happened previously and what will happen next (either because they did not know or it was all lost in the editing) and so every scene is a tedious stand-alone melodramatic piece, emotionally detached from every other scene.

Harrison is a notable cut-above, inserting an edge of confidence and sardonic humour in his performance as Caesar, and the film's second half without him is much the poorer. Roddy McDowall as Octavian is the only other standout performer, perhaps over-the-top but suitable as an impressively calculative leader.

Cleopatra's entrance into Rome is an admittedly impressive piece of cinematic extravagance. But like the rest of the film, it's a display of indulgent pageantry without soul.

All Ace Black Movie Blog reviews are here.

Movie Review: Raintree County (1957)

A misguided attempt to create another Gone With The Wind, Raintree County sometimes looks gorgeous but sets a new benchmark for boredom.

Indiana, 1859. John Wickliff Shawnessey (Montgomery Clift) is a recently graduated young man in love with his sweetheart Nell (Eva Marie Saint). John is also enthralled by his teacher Professor Stiles (Nigel Patrick), and inspired by Stiles' words John goes into the swamplands on a fruitless quest to look for the mythical Raintree that gives the county its name. But John is soon hopelessly distracted by the arrival of the beautiful Susanna Drake (Elizabeth Taylor), a southern belle on a visit. After a brief tryst Susanna announces that she is pregnant, and John does the honourable thing and marries her. But the pregnancy story was a ruse and she was never carrying his child.

Further tension is added when John, a firm pro-Lincoln abolitionist, learns that Susanna supports slavery. On a trip south to her hometown of New Orleans John learns of Susanna's troubled family history, including a tragic house fire that killed her parents and a beloved Negro housekeeper. With Susanna starting to exhibit signs of mental illness, they move back north and start a family. The eruption of the Civil War adds more stress and John eventually has to fulfil his military duty and save his family.

An adaptation of a book by Ross Lockridge, Jr., Raintree County has the ingredients that could have created a rousing epic: a civil war setting, a mismatched romance, a clash of ideas between progressive idealism and prevailing oppression, academic discourse, and plenty of melodramatic personal tragedies. The settings are gorgeous and the costumes are lavish.

Somehow, in the hands of director Edward Dmytryk and screenwriter Millard Kaufman, the film never comes close to igniting. With horrid pacing, stiff dialogue and through-the-motions acting, Raintree County is three hours of tortuous boredom.

Whether before or after the car accident that scarred his face and shut down production for months, Montgomery Clift is bland and boring, a black hole sucking energy at the heart of the film. Elizabeth Taylor is poorly served by harsh characterization that destroys all empathy early: Susanna is a woman who lies about a pregnancy and goes to bed with an army of dolls, including a grotesque half-burned figurine. Subtle, coy or clever she is not, and between Susanna's unhinged personality and John's emptiness the film has nothing to latch onto.

Very late in the film John joins the war effort, and in the company of colourful rogue Orville 'Flash' Perkins (an over-animated Lee Marvin) Dmytryk finally finds a faint pulse, but even the battle scenes carry a cheap whiff.

As Clift and Taylor dominate scene after scene, the secondary cast is confined to the far background. Eva Marie Saint is, well, saintly as the long-suffering true love. Rod Taylor drifts in and out of the film on a single note as a politician-in-waiting. Agnes Moorehead and Walter Abel appear lost as John's parents.

A laborious exercise in endurance despite some pretty visuals, Raintree County is a painful slog through waist-high swamp waters.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.

Movie Review: The Sandpiper (1965)

A romantic drama, The Sandpiper sets out to examine the mid 1960s generational divide but is excessively talky, stodgy and melodramatic.

In the Big Sur coastal area of California, Laura Reynolds (Elizabeth Taylor) is a free-spirited artist and single mom homeschooling her 9 year old son Danny. When the child's innocent mischievousness gets him into trouble with the law, Judge Thompson (Torin Thatcher) orders him into a religious boarding school run by Dr. Edward Hewitt (Richard Burton) and his wife Claire (Eva Marie Saint), despite Laura's protests.

Edward and Laura immediately clash about morals, values and perspectives on life, but gradually an attraction develops. Edward starts to find excuses to pass by Laura's beachside house, where he tangles with her friend, outspoken sculptor Cos Erickson (Charles Bronson). A full fledged passionate extramarital affair blossoms between Edward and Laura, causing him enormous feelings of guilt. The reemergence of Ward Hendricks (Robert Webber), one of Laura's former lovers, further complicates matters.

Featuring the celebrity couple of the era at the peak of their fame, The Sandpiper has good intentions to explore the shifting sands of society. Director Vincente Minnelli and a team of writers including Dalton Trumbo deserve credit for attempting to craft a cerebral love story, where the dialogue skips past the inane and engages weightier topics of guilt, personal freedom, and the movement away from traditional, religiously-dictated values and towards personally-defined beliefs.

But the problems are many and start with Taylor and Burton unable to convince in their roles or help the premise succeed. Taylor as a hippie who has turned her back on societal norms just does not wash. The actress is too glamorous for the role, and apart from delivering the lines written for her she never captures what it means to be a free spirit, neither in mannerisms nor looks. Too often Taylor appears in stunning outfits, hair made-up, full make-up on, hat sitting just so, a superstar awkwardly playing at being a hippie.

Meanwhile Burton is reserved and one-dimensional, Edward professing his love for Laura through clenched teeth. As a real life couple rocking the world with their love affair, it is remarkable how little of that chemistry makes it to the screen.

Charles Bronson as a beach artist is miscast, and Eva Marie Saint as the suffering wife is underused.

Minnelli does well to capture the jagged beauty of Big Sur, but otherwise allows the film to drag on for two hours. The plot, from a story written specifically for Taylor and Burton by producer Martin Ransohoff, is simply not strong enough to sustain the running length, and scene after scene of endless gab slow the drama down to a sleepwalking pace. Ironically the film perks up the most in a scene unrelated to the romance, when Edward confronts his professional life and admits that he is a sell-out who has strayed far from his principles.

The Sandpiper is a love story without the requisite passion, the momentum of the ocean crashing onto rocks far surpassing the energy of the central romance.

All Ace Black Movie Blog reviews are here.

Movie Review: Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? (1966)

A talky drama about a marriage in turmoil, Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? breaks new ground in frank discourse and features astounding acting performances. It is also over the top and tiresome in its obsession with shouty drunkenness.

Middle aged married couple Martha and George (Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton) walk home at 2am, after attending a party at the house of Martha's father, the president of the college where George teaches history. Once home Martha and George bicker continuously, his passive aggressiveness a response to her continuous agitation. She then announces that despite the late hour, she has invited another couple for a visit to continue socializing.

Nick and Honey (George Segal and Sandy Dennis) soon arrive. He is a young and ambitious biology professor at the same college, while she is mousy, loves to drink and gets sick easily. The visitors are at first astounded by Martha and George's incessant war of words, and the night gets weirder when Martha reveals that she and George have a 16 year-old son, conspicuous by his absence. With the alcohol flowing, Martha then proceeds to humiliate George, expressing her disappointment with his lack of ambition. But George has tricks up his sleeve as well, and extracts information out of Nick that he will use to his advantage as the night progresses.

An adaptation of the Edward Albee Broadway play sensation, written for the screen and produced by Ernest Lehman and directed by Mike Nichols, Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? (the title refers to a silly song) is at once intolerable and irresistible. Featuring what at the time was considered scandalous and borderline profane dialogue, the idea of spending more than two hours with four distinctly unlikable characters humiliating each other is almost tortuous. But the performances and the appeal of watching a marriage disappearing into a mushroom cloud of carnage turn the experience into a must-see psychological case study.

The union between Martha and George has disintegrated into a combative relationship that feeds on its own poison, an example of love's extension snapping into hateful dependency. The acrimony serves as the film's fuel, but is also carried several steps too far. Even for this couple the gamesmanship on display steps into fantasy territory, and the final 30 minutes run on vapours, Martha and George stepping over the cliff and into the domain of the ridiculous.

Taylor and Burton do their best to keep a hold of the material, and in many ways Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? is only watchable thanks to the two legendary stars and real-life combustible couple. Yes, of course they are theatrical, but they are also commanding, and Taylor and Burton make it impossible not to be drawn into the tumultuous life of Martha and George.

Taylor won her second Best Actress Academy Award, while Sandy Dennis won the Best Supporting Actress trophy. Hers is a well written role, but also much less difficult: Honey spends most of the film in a drunken haze, from where confused but impactful quips are easy to deliver. George Segal suffers from the least convincing of the four lead roles, his biology professor too easily falling into Martha and George's lair, neither his ambition nor his naivete ever convincing enough to justify his actions.

The film's almost total reliance on alcohol consumption gets quite laborious. Every two minutes drinks are being offered, conspicuously consumed or discussed. Drama dependent on drunken incoherence is cheapened, and the film errs on the side of piling on cruelty based on artificial lubrication.

In an astonishing big screen directorial debut, Nichols moves his cameras and perspectives in a remarkable display of agility in confined spaces. The film is more often about reactions than actions, and Nichols plays with focus and placement, highlighting characters in the background and sometimes in entirely other rooms listening in to heighten the drama of not just what is being said, but also how it is being received by the intended and unintended audience.

Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? is less than perfect but also an unmistakable milestone, vicious manipulation achieving new levels of intended and collateral psychological damage.

All Ace Black Movie Blog reviews are here.

Movie Review: Giant (1956)

A sprawling Texas family epic set in the first half of the 20th Century, Giant tackles a myriad of social issues but suffers from a meandering second half.

Jordan “Bick” Benedict Jr. (Rock Hudson) is a wealthy Texas cattle rancher, and an owner of an enormous acreage. He travels to Maryland to buy War Winds, an expensive horse belonging to the Lynnton family. Bick not only buys the horse, but he also falls in love and marries the Lynntons’ daughter Leslie (Elizabeth Taylor).

Upon returning to Texas, Leslie immediately clashes with Bick’s unmarried sister Luz (Mercedes McCambridge), who runs the Benedict household and is threatened by Leslie’s presence.  Upon her death Luz leaves a small parcel of land to Jett Rink (James Dean), a loner ranch hand who maintains a tense relationship with Bick. Jett develops a crush on Leslie, and refuses to sell his newly inherited property despite a seemingly generous offer from Bick.

Leslie proves herself to be tough, independent, and outspoken, and forces Bick to confront sexism and racism issues in his social circle. She demonstrates unusual compassion to Mexican peasants living in a nearby village, and displays disgust when Bick attempts to exclude her from business conversations. Meanwhile, Jett strikes oil and starts to build enormous wealth. Despite tough times, the marriage between Bick and Leslie endures; they raise three children, and have to deal with the trials of parenting and unmet expectations as the oil boom brings unimagined riches and World War Two erupts.

Based on the Edna Ferber book, the first half of Giant is a compelling story of the sophisticated but headstrong Leslie carving out space for herself in the new and strange world of rural Texas. The narrative generates a steady current of topical issues, including attitudinal differences towards the hired help, racial sensitivities, and the status of women. Hudson, Taylor, McCambridge and Dean sparkle as they challenge the prevailing limits, Taylor reveling in the role of Leslie as a change catalyst, upsetting a status quo that already featured simmering and unresolved issues swirling around Jett’s mysterious charisma.

Director George Stevens explores these themes against a backdrop of the wide-open plains of Texas. This is country where the personalities have to be big to match the endless terrain. The film is filled with impressive and sometimes breathtaking widescreen shots that convey the scale of both the expansive outdoors and the lavish indoors, and Stevens then adds the vertical element as an army of oil derricks sprouts out of the earth and reaches for the sky, pumping black gold.

There is enough drama for a complete film in the story of Bick and Leslie meeting and establishing their life together. But Giant is an ambitious 201 minute effort, and the second half inevitably starts to drag. Bick and Leslie's kids grow up and introduce a new dynamic, and the film starts to stutter from one bland familial conflict to another, rehashing themes already chewed on in the first 100 minutes. Jett Rink evolves into a surly oil tycoon, providing James Dean, in his final film role, with the opportunity to indulge in the worst excesses of method mumbling.

Giant also suffers from some simply awful makeup effects when it comes to the aging of Bick, Leslie, and Jett. Hudson, Taylor, and Dean are provided with ridiculous mops of silver blue hair to denote middle age, but otherwise appear to suffer no wrinkles, weight gain or change in posture. The effect is amateurish and becomes an unfortunate distraction in the film’s latter stages.

The large cast helps to maintain interest. Carroll Baker does her best to enliven the second generation as Luz Benedict II, the daughter of Bick and Leslie. Jett’s unsavoury pursuit of the younger Luz is the most interesting sub-plot in the latter stages, as he tries to fill the void of the friendship he had with the older Luz and his unrequited love for Leslie. Dennis Hopper, Sal Mineo and Rod Taylor also contribute small supporting roles.

Giant boasts a mammoth scale, and although the achievement does not fully match the intent, the result is impressively grand in scope and ambition.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.

Movie Reviews: The V.I.P.s (1963)

An ensemble cast multi-story drama set in and around a London airport, The V.I.P.s maintains a steady level of interest thanks to the numerous stars on display, but never manages to properly take off.

A group of rich travellers gather at a London airport in preparation for a flight to New York. Frances Andros (Elizabeth Taylor) is dropped off at the airport by her preoccupied businessman husband Paul (Richard Burton) to travel to a presumed vacation, but she is secretly planning to abandon her marriage and elope with international gigolo Marc Champselle (Louis Jourdan). Australian businessman Les Mangrum (Rod Taylor) is financially stretched to the limit, and must make it to a meeting in New York to salvage his business. He is accompanied by his loyal assistant Miss Mead (Maggie Smith). Pompous actor Max Buda (Orson Welles) must make it out of Britain by midnight, or otherwise face a hefty tax bill. He is accompanied by aspiring starlet Gloria Gritti (Elsa Martinelli). And the Duchess of Brighton (Margaret Rutherford) carries a big title but has no financial means to keep up her estate. She is hoping to land a job in Florida to help pay the bills.

When thick fog descends on the airport and delays the flight, the travellers have to face their crises. Things get worse when they are forced to stay overnight at an airport hotel. Frances is torn between Paul, who pays her little attention but is passionate in his love, and Marc, who seems to love her but may be an opportunist. Les risks everything by authorizing a bad cheque while remaining oblivious to Miss Mead's feelings towards him, and Max's accountant has to come up with an innovative, but awkward, solution to his client's tax problems.

Directed by Anthony Asquith and written by Terence Rattigan, The V.I.P.s has an intriguing premise, tapping into the growing fascination with the emerging jet set of rich people worried about money and relationships within their world of privilege. Adding real-life couple Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor into the mix helps the glamour quotient despite rather pedestrian execution.

Asquith brings to life an airport buzzing with activity, the V.I.P. lounge a crossroads of the rich and powerful acting all rich and powerful, and fawned upon by dedicated airport staff. When the drama moves to the hotel the film loses steam and becomes more stagebound, as what is essentially a talkfest is deprived of the surrounding energy generated by a major transportation hub.

Understandably focussing on Paul and Frances Andros, The V.I.P.s spends a long time on Frances' dilemma, exposing in the process the couple's frivolity. She can't decide whether to give her husband another chance to demonstrate genuine affection, or abandon him and tie her fate to a recognized playboy. Her hesitation becomes tedious, and is not helped by Paul running around with a handgun and a short temper, while Marc oozes smarm from every pore.

A bit more interesting is Maggie Smith as Miss Mead, the phenomenally efficient and equally devoted assistant to the jovial Les Mangrum. In just her fourth screen role, Smith combines secretarial capability with secretly held love and delivers the film's most sensitive performance. At the other end of the scale are Welles, Martinelli and Rutherford, who grab onto the broadest definitions of their characters and delve no further. Rutherford somehow won the Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for a monotonal and ill-defined turn as the dotty Duchess of Brighton.

The V.I.P.s are reasonably engaging characters, but their stories include some bothersome turbulence.

All Ace Black Movie Blog reviews are here.

Movie Review: Father Of The Bride (1950)

A heart-warming comedy, Father Of The Bride pokes fun at a father's befuddled emotions, with Spencer Tracy in top form and Elizabeth Taylor blossoming into adulthood.

Kay Banks (Taylor) suddenly announces to her parents Stan and Ellie (Tracy and Joan Bennett) that she will be marrying boyfriend Buckley Dunstan (Don Taylor). The news that his only daughter is about to fly the nest comes as a complete shock to Stan, who does not even know who Buckley is, let alone what he does for a living, how he will support Kay, and who his parents are.

After overcoming the initial shock, Stan meets Buckley and then his parents Doris and Herbert, and the family starts planning for the wedding. Although everyone desires a small ceremony and reception, the event quickly grows into a major and expensive event, complete with a snooty wedding planner. And just as the big day approaches, Kay and Buckley encounter a crisis.

Capturing every father's frazzled feelings when he realizes that his baby girl is about to belong to another man, Father Of The Bride is a bittersweet comedy. The film strikes all the perfect tones, as Stan progresses through the shock of receiving the news, anxiety about his future son-in-law, pride in his daughter, financial panic as the wedding arrangements threaten to get out of hand, and finally sweet resignation to just go with the flow. Spencer Tracy brings plenty of sincerity to the role, allowing the comedy to remain soft and grounded in genuine emotion.

All of the humour comes from the disconnect between Stan's bluster and his actual actions, as he misses every opportunity to actually get to know Buckley and his parents. Stan is of course clueless that he is the architect of his own angst. And when the wedding arrangements move into high gear, his natural inclination to want to solve problems collides with the expensive reality of professional event planning, and he is eventually sidelined into one role: paying the mounting bills.

At the heart of the movie is the tender relationship between father and daughter. The king loves his princess beyond what he can ever convey, and the idea of her heart being tied to another man is agonizing. Yet Stan cannot help but be proud of his role in the woman that Kay has become, and Tracy's performance finds that line between personal loss and unbridled joy.

Joan Bennett and Elizabeth Taylor are more physically busy than Tracy as the wedding day approaches, director Vincente Minnelli placing dad at the centre of the storm and therefore the point around which everything else revolves. Bennett and Taylor effectively portray women caught up in one of the biggest events of their lives, Ellie and Kay finally marginalizing Stan into an observer, ironically the perfect vantage point to come to terms with his emotions.

With wit and pathos hand in hand, Father Of The Bride walks down the aisle with pride.

All Ace Black Movie Blog reviews are here.

The Movies Of Elizabeth Taylor

All movies starring Elizabeth Taylor and reviewed on the Ace Black Movie Blog are linked below:

Jane Eyre (1943, uncredited)

Life With Father (1947)

Father Of The Bride (1950)

A Place In The Sun (1951)

Quo Vadis (1951, uncredited cameo)

The Last Time I Saw Paris (1954)

Giant (1956)

Raintree County (1957)

Cat On A Hot Tin Roof (1958)

Suddenly Last Summer (1959)

Cleopatra (1963)

The V.I.P.s (1963)

The Sandpiper (1965)

Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? (1966)

Reflections In A Golden Eye (1967)

Anne Of The Thousand Days (1969, uncredited)

Winter Kills (1979, uncredited)

The Mirror Crack'd (1980)

All Ace Black Movie Blog reviews are here.
The Movie Star Index is here.

Movie Review: Reflections In A Golden Eye (1967)

A train wreck of weird characters behaving badly, Reflections In A Golden Eye goes off the rails early and never recovers. The story of suppressed homosexuality on an army base teaming with lust and madness spirals into self-imposed chaos.

Major Weldon Penderton (Marlon Brando) commands a US army base in the south. He is stiff, unhappy, suppressed and not interested in sleeping with his wife Leonora (Elizabeth Taylor). She enjoys riding her horse Firebird, and finds sexual satisfaction with willing neighbour Lieutenant Colonel Morris Langdon (Brian Keith). Langdon's wife Alison (Julie Harris) is deeply depressed following the death three years earlier of her newborn child. Alison is only happy in the company of the effeminate and extroverted Filipino houseboy Anacleto (Zorro David).

Also on the base, Private Williams (Robert Forster) looks after cleaning the horses and stables, and has the habit of riding horses in the nude. Penderton starts to get attracted to Williams, who in turn starts stalking the the Penderton household, and invading Leonora's room while she sleeps. With Alison's condition worsening, Penderton growing ever more enamoured with Williams, and Williams developing the unhealthy habit of sniffing Leonora's underwear, the boiling emotions finally erupt.

Based on a 1941 novel by Carson McCullers, Reflections In A Golden Eye is just too close to an unintended comedy. Five of the main characters belong in a mental asylum, rather than a military base, and without a sensible core to hold the film together, it resembles more of a farce than a drama.

Penderton is dour, preens at himself in the mirror, mumbles his incomprehensible military teachings to the bewilderment of his students, gets into a fight with a horse, and stalks his men around the base. Leonora is wild-eyed, over-sexed, and happy to humiliate her man, including whipping him across the face at a swanky party. Alison is deep into depression, operating at the edge of reason, while Williams is a voyeur, an intruder, a lingerie-sniffer, and rides horses while naked. And finally there is Anacleto, floating, dancing, singing and smiling for his own entertainment in an astonishing display of flightiness.

The performances match the characters in a theatrical display of exaggeration. Brando mutters, rambles and stares, while Taylor sticks either her rear end or her cleavage in Brando's face at every opportunity. Harris mostly just looks into the non-existent distance, and Forster, in his debut, wears a single fixed look of anguish and hardly says anything. Zorro David, in his first and mercifully last movie appearance, is in a world on his own, doing something that on a bad day may resemble acting, but even that is debatable. Brian Keith is left with the only semi-rational character, and he is naturally overwhelmed.

It is all supposed to represent suppression and lust, but director John Huston never finds the fine line where normal behaviour is strained by unresolved internal conflict, and settles instead for a large serving of outright battiness. Huston adds to the air of melodrama-run-amok by tinting the movie with a golden hue, creating a gold-and-black film with just the odd object per frame maintaining its colour. According to the peerless Anacleto, it's all supposed to represent the reflection of what a golden peacock's eye can see, but the effect is that of basic nausea. After the film bombed, normal colour was restored to later prints, but the film's awfulness is most appreciated with the original pee-coloured vision.

Forget the military base: Reflections In A Golden Eye is a certifiable cuckoo's nest.

All Ace Black Movie Blog reviews are here.