Elizabeth Taylor famously, and publicly, hated this movie, but not I!
I mean moreso her performance in it, it's nowhere near my favourite Elizabeth Taylor film, but I am fully subscribed to the legend and the myth of Elizabeth Taylor in the scandalous '50s and '60s. So talented, so beautiful, such a commanding presence. You can't not watch Elizabeth Taylor when she's on screen.
BUtterfield 8 tells the story of a call girl named Gloria Wandrous who begins an affair with a married man and learns more about herself in the process. Pro tip: do not watch this right after Room at the Top if you found Laurence Harvey insufferable in that movie. I made that mistake, and as soon as I saw his name in the opening credits, I rolled my eyes like "This f*cking guy?" No offense to Laurence Harvey as a person, he just doesn't have a good track record of characters with me as of late. With BUtterfield 8, we follow Gloria discovering why she treats sex the way she does; we see her want to change.
This whole movie feels like it was adapted from a pulp fiction book that you ordered out of the back of a magazine, and nobody ever confessed to actually buying it, but somehow everyone's read it? I would've dated it as being a recent book adaptation, but imagine my shock to discover that the novel, BUtterfield 8, was published in the 1930s! They did a fantastic job modernizing the story.
So the reason why Elizabeth hated this movie is because she had no say in whether or not she'd make it. MGM forced her to make it to fulfill her contract and leave her free to move over to 20th Century Fox and film
Cleopatra. She was recorded as saying, about
BUtterfield 8: "I hated it so much. I thought, "fuck them!"—they made me do the film. I didn't want to. I did it with a pistol at my head. The lines were so diabolical. It was such a piece of shit. And it made me angry. And out of the anger, it kind of gave me an incentive. ... It was done out of anger."
The default look on Gloria's face is simmering contempt, so this is very believable. Despite how much she hated it, she's great in it. Of course, Elizabeth already had many fantastic performances behind her, like
Giant,
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and
Suddenly, Last Summer and so many great movies to come:
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (which won her a second Oscar) and
The Taming of the Shrew to name a few. But this Oscar win cemented her status. She wasn't just a screen goddess and a front-page scandal. She was a serious actress.
Elizabeth Taylor was nominated against Greer Garson (Sunrise at Campobello), Deborah Kerr (The Sundowners), Shirley MacLaine (The Apartment), and Melina Mercouri (Never on Sunday).
Shirley MacLaine would famously proclaim that she lost the Oscar to a tracheotomy. Elizabeth would also say it in the decades that followed. She'd contracted pneumonia before the Oscars while filming Cleopatra in London and nearly died until this medical intervention. Despite all the scandal of the Elizabeth Taylor/Eddie Fisher/Debbie Reynolds having ruined Elizabeth's reputation in the years prior to BUtterfield 8, there was speculation that this illness turned the tides back in her favour and led her to her first of two Oscar wins.
If I were voting... I'm not sure I'd have voted for Elizabeth. I'm not mad she won, though. I think it would've been hard to choose between Shirley, because The Apartment is such a perfect film; and Melina Mercouri is also fantastic in Never on Sunday.
DID I LIKE BUTTERFIELD 8? I did, but I definitely understand the criticisms of it.
Did you like BUtterfield 8? What are your thoughts on Elizabeth Taylor's first Oscar win?
Keep up with all my Rewatching the Best Actresses posts here.
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