The Sandpiper – directed by Vincent Minnelli. Romantic Melodrama. A free spirited single mother living in Big Sur, California, must surrender her young son to a private school and its headmaster, an Episcopal ministr, to whom she, before long, surrenders herself as well. 117 minutes Color 1965.
★★★
Shoddy in concept and in execution, this was the first film Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor made together after their marriage. It mimics their resounding affair. She draws him away from another woman, played with lackluster efficiency, as best she may, considering the script, by Eva Saint. In The VIPs, he was drawn from his marriage to Taylor to another woman. In Cleopatra she drew him away from his wife. Their work in film tended to create their personal lives, but in that sense, life did not imitate art; art killed life;and life art. Everyone said she drew him away from his proper work as a great classical actor. Wrong. He was a classical actor but he never was, and he knew he never would be, a great one. No, their film lives intermingled in the huge public imagination about them and made their souls change. People who can write their own ticket, tend to go nowhere. This film is an example of their arrival at that locale.
Essentially, she is the better film actor, and therefore the better actor. But her acting was instinctual with her, and as she grew older, her instincts failed her as she failed her life. Here she seems barely competent at times – but nobody else does either, except Burton. The pomp of Richard Burton’s voice carries him through the role on one level, and his shamefaced eyes carry him through it on another level. There is no third level to the part available. All levels are unfair to the word superficiality.
Vincent Minnelli, a stickler for detail, had, of course, fifteen years before, directed Elizabeth Taylor in Father Of The Bride and Father’s Little Dividend, in which she shone. But here the execution looks slapdash and hurried and under-rehearsed. The ghastly thing about it is that it was written by the producer, so, of course, nothing would be changed. One supposes that Elizabeth Taylor accepted it, yes, of course for the money, but also probably because she was 33, and had to make hay while the sun shone upon her youth and beauty. She was no dope. But here her scenes which should be touching and yearning and caring, are not properly held in mood and framing by the cinemaphotographer. Everything looks phony and worked up. Even the party at Nepenthe looks forced – with the sort of “earth-dancing” that never went on there. This is shocking, for Minnelli had a great sense of his extras; he gave them tasks and characters; you can see that so clearly in The Bandwagon – but not here. Taylor is an actress who needs a velvet setting like a gorgeous ruby. Like Garbo, she’s a trophy actress who, because of her remarkable looks, needs protection. Minnelli gives her none. Instead he plays to her weaknesses, which are to allow her to force emotion out, rather than in, and to fail to curb her physicalization of them which is the result of that forcing. Taylor’s acting instrument can only be played by her when it is contained. She is not a virtuoso actor. She is a concert grand, but you must not play Liszt on her, Elizabeth. You are that rare thing, a romantic actress, but you were not meant for all romances. As voyeurs to their romance, we all went to The Sandpiper with our wives in those days and wondered at our marriages as we did so. For, looking at Taylor and Burton in it, we asked ourselves, Are they missing something?