BUtterfield 8 12/16/12, Best Actress, 1960
Usually if it takes me this long to write something about a movie, there’s something wrong and I can’t quite put my finger on it. Elizabeth Taylor won her first Oscar for her role as Gloria Wandrous, of an inexact profession (she seems to make appearances at clubs or restaurants wearing designer clothes; I think there’s a name for that but cannot remember it right now). Whatever her real profession is, she spends a lot of time with different men, and has a slightly unsavory reputation. Laurence Harvey comes along and may be the one man who can change her path, and she his. Harvey is Weston Liggett, a bored corporate executive who drinks too much and is tired of his life with his wife and her moneyed family. Gloria is a complex person, she loves her mother and hates hurting her with her bad behavior; she loves her oldest friend, Steve (played by her then-husband, Eddie Fisher), but he seems to enable her self-destructive actions; and she longs for someone’s approval, Steve’s, her mother’s, Liggett’s? I was surprised at how impressed I was with Taylor; I thought she did a fabulous job with her portrayal. It was nuanced and subtle, and then fiery and passionate. Taylor won an Oscar for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? which was an assault on the auditory nerves and painful for me to watch, so this was a totally different performance. I think the conflicting feelings came in because I just don’t know if I would recommend this movie. So, I guess I will leave it to you: if you like Elizabeth Taylor and want to see her before any of the Cleopatra or Virginia Woolf histrionics, you should see it; if you really don’t think you care, you can skip it.
