It’s hard
to find anyone today with much good to say about the film. When it came out,
critics and even those most closely associated with the outcome of the movie
felt just as strongly about the movie:
*Star Elizabeth Taylor took the role of promiscuous party girl Gloria Wandrous because
she had to, in order to fulfill the last in a three-picture deal.
*Singer Eddie Fisher, who got his supporting role (his first movie acting credit)
only at the insistence of his wife Taylor, never took another onscreen—perhaps
out of embarrassment, perhaps because Hollywood regarded it as proof positive
that he was best suited for his normal profession;
*Author John
O'Hara could be forgiven for his usual cantankerous attitude this time, as
he correctly believed that the Charles Schnee-John Michael Hayes screenplay had
badly oversimplified his Depression-era novel.
Admirers like myself badly miss a cinematic equivalent of his panoramic
view of class-ridden Manhattan in the Prohibition Era, as well as the bitter
lament of his Irish-American alter ego, James Malloy, about being viewed as
less than American by the WASP elite. (See my blog post from 14 years ago on the real-life scandal that O'Hara used as his springboard.)
With all
the disgust these figures felt, American moviegoers reacted differently. BUtterfield
8 earned $10 million at the box office, which, on a budget of approximately
$2 million, made it one of the biggest hits of 1960. And, in the new year,
Hollywood gave Taylor her the first of two Oscars for a role in a motion
picture that was little short of pornography.
The
Production Code Administration, Hollywood’s censorship arm, had made it
virtually impossible for more than two decades to bring O’Hara’s book to the
screen. Although Hayes observed late in his life that in 1960 films didn’t
encounter as many difficulties, that might have been in this case because the
screenplay eliminated the novel’s references to abortion and lesbianism.
There was also the matter of how to describe Gloria’s occupation: was she a prostitute or not? Certainly in the case of the movie, many have assumed that she was, even though she ostensibly modeled dresses in restaurants and other upscale settings.
But, particularly because of the opening scene, in which her married
lover Weston Liggett left her money from the night before (to pay for the dress
he tore in a drunken fit) and a joke by another lover that all the men she’s
been with “meet once a year at Yankee Stadium,” the thought lingered among many
that she was paid for her services.
(By the
way, for the benefit of younger readers, the first two capital letters in
“BUtterfield” are not a typo. They refer to how numbers were remembered in
those days—thus, “BU” represents 28.)
Conventional
wisdom holds that Taylor was awarded her Best Actress Oscar in sympathy for a
life-threatening bout of pneumonia that resulted in an emergency tracheotomy. I
won’t appraise the merits of the other nominees in the category. But it’s
doubtful that they had to surmount as much as Taylor—a subpar screenplay and an
extremely miscast co-star (Laurence Harvey).
The
opening scene, unfolding with hardly a word for nearly 10 minutes, depends
entirely on Taylor’s movements and expressions as she transitions from troubled
sleep to anger at the departed Liggett. And her confession to her platonic male
friend Steve of the sexual abuse she suffered as a child is searing.
Taylor
reportedly did not get along well with director Daniel Mann. (One story goes that,
when he handed her two eggs in their shells and told her to cook them in the next
scene, Taylor—whose schooling on the MGM lot evidently did not include home economics—responded,
“But what do I do with them?”)
Nevertheless,
I like to think that, with her great sense of humor, Taylor would have guffawed
at the notion that, even with a tawdry melodrama that brought such a sorry end
to the studio she had called home for 17 years, she had achieved a career
triumph in BUtterfield 8.
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