Customer Reviews

Butterfield 8

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3 star:		(12)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

`The most desirable girl in town is the easiest to find. Just call Butterfield-8!' So trumpeted the posters of this, Elizabeth Taylor's first Oscar winning performance. The film is a modernization of the 1935 novel by John O'Hara, which was based on the real life of the 1920's New York City call girl Starr Faithful.

Miss Taylor was dead set against playing Gloria Wandrous. She felt was a deliberate play by M.G.M. to capitalize on her recent notoriety in the Liz-Eddie-Debbie scandal. Also, she was anxious to move on to her first ever million-dollar role in Fox's Cleopatra. She was told by M.G.M that if she did not fulfill her contractual obligation to her home studio for one final film on her eighteen year contract that she would be kept off the screen for two years and miss making Cleopatra all together. She swore to the producer Pandro S. Berman that she would not learn her lines, not be prepared and in fact not give anything more and a walk through. Mr. Berman knew her better than she suspected. In the end Elizabeth Taylor turned in a professional, classic old style Hollywood performance that ranks at the top with the best of her work. She brings a savage rage to live to her searing portrait of a lost girl soaked through with sex and gin. A woman hoping against all hope to find salvation in yet one last man. Weston Leggett, a man who is worse off than she is in the self-esteem department. In her frantic quest for a clean new life Gloria finds that the male establishment will not allow her to step out of her role as a high priced party girl. She is pigeon holed by her past and the narrow mores of the late 50's are not about to let her fly free. Not the bar-buzzards of Wall Street, not her best friend Steve who abandons her at his girlfriend's insistence. Not even her shrink Dr. Treadman believes in her. The three women in her life are blind to who she really is. Her mother will not admit what Gloria has become. Mrs. Thurber will not believe she can ever change and Happy, the motel proprietor is too self involved in her own past to care who Gloria is She is the dark Holly Golightly and this is the lurid red jelled Metro-Color Manhattan that is the flip side of Billy Wilder's The Apartment (also 1960). Wilder's New York is cynical. Liz's tony East Side phone exchange rings only one way, the hard way. This New York is dammed. The film concludes in a melodramatic blaze that Douglas Sirk might have envied in place of his usually unsettling, unconvincing happy endings. In the end we have a bravura performance by the last true star of the old system. Yes she deserved the Oscar more for `Cat'. Yes it was given to welcome her back from the brink of death in London. And even Shirley MacLaine's lament on Oscar night, `I lost the Oscar to a tracheotomy.' can not diminish this must see performance by Miss Taylor.

In what one could call a perfect example of what an `Oscar scene' is all about she says it all. `I loved it! Every awful moment of it I loved. That's your Gloria, Steve. That's your precious Gloria!' She gave it to us with both barrels blazing, and M.G.M., and Berman be dammed.

In the normal scheme of things, lofty MGM wouldn't have touched John O'Hara's novel with a ten foot pole--but shortly before her contract was to end, MGM star Elizabeth Taylor besmirched her image by running off with Debbie Reynolds' husband Eddie Fisher. With her reputation in shreds and one foot outside the studio gate any way, MGM decided to capitalize on the bad press by casting Taylor as BUTTERFIELD 8's bad-girl-from-hell... and then, to add insult to injury, tucked Eddie Fisher into a supporting role and cast Debbie Reynolds look-alike Susan Oliver in the role of Eddie's girl friend, who feels threatened by Liz's manhungry ways. Liz fought the project tooth and nail, but MGM was adamant: she owed them another film, and she wasn't leaving until she made it.

BUTTERFIELD 8 is the story of Gloria Wandrous (Taylor), a hard-drinking, sexed-up, bed-hopping dress model who gets her kicks by seducing and then dumping men according to whim--until she encounters an unhappily married man just as hard and disillusioned as she in Weston Liggett (Laurence Harvey.) Although the production code was still somewhat in force, it had loosened up quite a bit since the days of NATIONAL VELVET, and while scenes stop short at the bedroom door they have plenty of sizzle while they walk up to it; moreover, every one in the film talks about sex so much you'd think it had just been invented. Taylor is on record saying that she considers the film a piece of trash, and she swears she has never actually seen it, that she would rather die than ever see it.

But something weird happened as the camera rolled. Taylor, doubtlessly driven by her fury at having to do the movie, gives a throw-away, over-the-top performance--but perversely, this is precisely what the role requires, and her performance was successful enough to earn her an Oscar. The supporting cast follows her lead, all of them performing in broad colors and bigger-than-life emotions, and again they too are quite successful, with Laurence Harvey and Dina Merrill (as his long suffering wife) particularly effective. Ultimately, of course, Elizabeth Taylor is quite right when she says the film is a piece of trash. But it is the best kind of trash because it is so completely trashy: BUTTERFIELD 8 doesn't just dive into the trash pile, it wallows in it with considerable conviction. Modern films of the same type may show more skin and more sex, but for sheer authority BUTTERFIELD 8 remains a standard against which most of them pale. Not every one will like it, but I recommend it all the same.

"Butterfield 8," directed by Daniel Mann, is basically a trashy soap opera. Elizabeth Taylor plays Gloria, a booze-guzzling, ... promiscuous young woman who becomes involved with an unhappily married businessman (Laurence Harvey). The opening scenes well establish the film's vibe: the story is saturated with cigarettes, alcohol, money, expensive fur, sex, and fury.

That said, I found B8 to be a wonderfully entertaining and surprisingly moving film. The delicious dialogue is full of memorable lines (like the one I used for the title of this review). The characters zap each other with some biting insults. A typical exchange between two characters: "Oh mother, don't be vulgar." Response: "Vulgarity has its uses."

The entire cast is solid, but this is undeniably Taylor's film. She takes what could have been a campy caricature and instead gives Gloria real depth and humanity. By the end of the film I was really engrossed in Gloria's personal journey. B8 may not be a great Hollywood classic, but it's a great showcase for the legendary Taylor.

"She's catnip to every cat in town," a bartender says of Gloria Wandrous, call girl and Party Girl #1, who is boozing it up, surrounded by a dozen men. Waking up in Wes Liggett's Fifth Avenue penthouse, she discovers he's left her a wad of money and a note saying, "Is $250 enough?" She hurls the money away, scrawling "No Sale" on the mirror with her lipstick. But she seems to forget that she is a call girl, and call girls accept money for services rendered. Unfortunately, Gloria is in love with Liggett, her "john", but he is married to someone else - a society matron poorly played by the cold, patrician beauty, Dina Merrill. As Gloria is leaving, she steals Ligget's wife's $7000 fur coat and starts all kinds of trouble. It certainly would have caused trouble today - the entire film is a PETA nightmare, as Gloria can be clocked wearing suede, lynx, coyote, mink, sable, beaver, and something that looks like skunk. The whole movie has Liz in her last fading bloom of youth, girded-to-the-gills and at the peak of her "eyebrows-of-death" period. Her Gloria-ously voluptuous figure is beginning to bulge and sag, but she is decked out to the nines in drop-dead stylish early-60s glamour. At the time, Liz and Jackie Kennedy were neck-and-neck in the glamour department, and the Jackie look is unmistakably present in Liz's styling. Though Jackie's never would be, Liz's cleavage is on abundant display. Cleavage was such a powerful metaphor for sex, then - a set-piece whose effectiveness would be impossible now (you practically have to show actors rutting on the floor to satisfy the modern taste). Liz was also at the peak of her Eddie Fisher period - playing a harlot on screen after stealing Fisher away from his real-life wife, Debbie Reynolds, only added to Liz's plummeting reputation. Fisher plays Gloria's friend who loves her but is not taken seriously by her. He's such a drip onscreen, that you can't help wondering how in real life this guy managed to attract one of the most glamorous women in the world. The suave and very continental Harvey is equally dull, especially as he commandeers that last 20 minutes of the film.
The part of Gloria won an Oscar for Liz Taylor - mysteriously, since the work is far inferior to many of Liz's previous films. Liz has proclaimed that this is the least favorite film she ever made - she was simply fulfilling the requirements of her contract. But when Liz is good, she's very, very good, but when she's bad, she gives it all she's got. Director Daniel Mann definitely had a way with leading-ladies. In addition to guiding Liz towards her Oscar, he did the same for Shirley Booth in *Come Back, Little Sheba* and Anna Magnani in *The Rose Tattoo*. Also directing Susan Hayward in *I'll Cry Tomorrow*, Mann certainly excels in these heavy-handed soapers. Based on the racy John O'Hara novel, the dialogue is dreadful. At one point Gloria tells her shrink, "I don't need you any more. I have no problems. I'm in love," as well as, "Someday Wes is going to find himself, and I want to be there." The script was so bad my sister and I veered off into a conversation about the Austin yogurt shop murders, and missed a scene full of lots of drinking, ultimatums and arched eyebrows, but we were riveted to the screen as Gloria is screaming, "Mama, face it! I was the slut of all time!" But even when shrieking, Liz is irresistible. And like Gloria says in the movie, "I loved it - every awful moment of it, I loved!"

This is my favorite Elizabeth Taylor performance.

Writer Paul Monette refers to this film as being one in a 'trilogy' of bad girl roles for Elizabeth Taylor--the other two being "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof"(1958) and "Suddenly,Last Summer"(1959). These three films should be in every DVD collection. Certainly they present Taylor at her absolute physical peak, but they also show the dark side of her sexuality, which is quite riveting.

Taylor loves to refer to this movie as "trash", even though she won an Oscar for the role. Maybe she felt she was being exploited by the studio with this film's content due to her highly publicized love affairs at the time. However, SEX SELLS, and as a beautiful, voluptuous, and semi-amoral model, Taylor has never been better. She simply smoulders in this film, especially in the 'morning after' scenes in the beginning. Taylor in her tight slip, drink in hand, is now an iconic Hollywood image. Also, she and Laurence Harvey make a VERY HOT team, SCORCHING, something we've never seen with Taylor and Richard Burton.

There's one scene in the film, in a nightclub, where Taylor and Harvey are at a table... and although Taylor is approached by a number of admirers, she continually looks over at Harvey, plays with her pearls, and smiles so shyly, SOOOO sweetly at him...a beautiful, glowing moment.

Contrast that with their final meeting in a diner: Harvey suprises Taylor there, and the frozen look of shock & awe on her face! Another wonderful moment...interestingly, this film is FILLED with many wonderful moments from Elizabeth the actor. She has many difficult scenes to play with no dialog--- she begins AND ends the film in long scenes with very little dialog--- yet she has created here a believable, complex 'sixties' heroine.

The movie is really a TAYLOR STAR VECHICLE, it's all about HER, with a great leading man, and some excellent supporting players. A great showcase. And Elizabeth does do some good acting, very moving in the confession scene and in her last scene with Harvey as she tries to escape him. Her acting here is certainly Oscar-worthy to me.

Also interesting is the fact that this may be the first American film to link child molestation with promiscuity, or even talk about such subjects. Remember this was made in 1960.

For me this film is part of another trilogy... one of three Best Actress Oscar-winning roles of women gambling with their sexuality to find happiness, with each one losing--- Elizabeth here, Simone Signoret in "Room at the Top" (1959), and Julie Christie in "Darling" (1965)... and Laurence Harvey was in all THREE films!!

Despite the thoughts of some critics and indeed Elizabeth Taylor herself at times about this film, I've always admired it and firmly believe it is an unfairly maligned production with many interesting elements. It really represents the last breath of old style Hollywood moviemaking at MGM, a studio famed for displaying its female stars to best advantage in glossy productions. In my belief Elizabeth Taylor delivers good work as high class call girl Gloria Wanderous who despite being in her own words "The slut of all time", actually reeks sophistication and a rare beauty not seen in movies nowadays. Even in decline MGM was still capable of surrounding their star with the best in supporting players, costumes and opulent settings,which helped make "Butterfield 8", their biggest grossing film for 1960.

"Butterfield 8" stands for the telephone answering service used by Gloria's "customers" when they want her services. Supposedly working as a model and "hostess", or so her trusting mother (Mildred Dunnock) would like to believe, Gloria is actually a high class prostitute catering to bored and wealthy married men. One such man Weston Liggett (Laurence Harvey) comes into her life and for the first time Gloria finds herself falling in love with a client who previously would have been one of the faceless men she encounters in her work. Liggett has married into an old money background and Gloria is made very aware of her real status when after an all night lovemaking session Weston leaves her money for her "troubles" beginning for Gloria a downward spiral to a tragic ending. Along the way we see the other parts of Gloria's shabby life from best friend Steve (Taylor's real life husband Eddie Fisher), who is like an older protective brother and who has a disapproving girlfriend Norma (Susan Oliver). Norma resents Gloria's continued intrusions into their lives and sees her as a threat to their future happiness together. Gloria travels a rocky road in her relationship with Weston as he married his aristocratic wife Emily (Dina Merrill) solely for the money and position that came with it. Emily plays the patient wife who looks the other way in regard to his infidelities and she realises that Weston is having an affair when one of her Mink Coats is taken by Gloria after she spends a night in the apartment with Weston. Seeing that Weston will never be able to break away from the grip of Emily's family and his ties to her money, Gloria tries to break off the romance and leaves to begin a new life in Boston. Weston however finds he cannot overcome his passion for her and goes off in pursuit where after an aborted chase Gloria wrecks her car and is killed on an unmade freeway. Weston then returns to his dull life that he knew before the excitment of the girl at "Butterfield 8".

Passed off as sensationalist magazine fiction, "Butterfield 8", was in fact based on a novel by John O'Hara that created a few sparks itself due to it's "illicit" subject matter. Elizabeth Taylor was highly resistant to playing the role of Gloria despite it being the last film in her long running contract with MGM. It was responsible for holding her up from accepting the lead role in "Cleopatra" being planned by Twentieth Century Fox for which she was being paid a record One Million dollars. Also she felt that the studio was unfairly trying to cash in on her recent notoriety surrounding her controversial marriage to Eddie Fisher. Despite her clashes with director Daniel Mann Elizabeth I believe has rarely been more exciting on screen and turns in a multi layered performance that has elements of glamour, tragedy and passion. Rarely has she looked more beautiful in a film and the often elaborate settings play up the glamourous side of the story that reeks old Hollywood. Laurence Harvey registers well as the bored man facing the crisis of his life over whether to follow his heart or stay in his "safe" zone. He has a great chemistry with Elizabeth Taylor and would be reteam with her 13 years later in the excellent, seldom seen thriller "Night Watch". Eddie Fisher is the one weak link in the story as Gloria's friend Steve. In a role originally intended for David Janssen, Fisher reveals his lack of real acting talent however Susan Oliver as girlfriend Norma excels in her few scenes, in particular in her catty exchanges with Gloria which are among the most meaty in the story. Another standout is Kay Medford in a heartbreaking performance as the sad "seen it all" owner of the seedy motel where Weston and Gloria often have their rendezvous.

"Butterfield 8", is real old style filmmaking with a production full of beautiful clothes, lush settings with well heeled people emeshed in heartbreaking situations. The moralistic tone of the early sixties demanded that "bad girl", Gloria ultimately pay for her sins but this doesn't detract from the films great entertainment value. Should Elizabeth Taylor have won the 1960 Best Actress Oscar? It's open to debate however I for one admire her performance here greatly and it undoubtedly shows Taylor in all her movie queen splendour. Beginning a decade where her main leading man would repeatedly be Richard Burton, her teaming with Laurence Harvey is an interesting one that works well. Enjoy Elizabeth Taylor in her hotly debated Oscar win in John O'Hara's "Butterfield 8".

I saw SOME of this movie as a child and was told to leave the room because it was for "grown ups"..Well I knew I had to have it and
I am glad that I got it..This movie is filled w/allll of the good stuff..
extra martial affairs, alcohol abuse, love, hate, greed and class.

Ms. Taylor is at her best, this movie is fabulous!! I have given it to friends to watch and EVERYONE raves about how they cannot believe this movie was made in 1960...gritty and charming!!

It's a guilty-pleasure movie for sure, but I like those. And i LOVE that we, the consumer, can actually CHOOSE and not have it dictated to us whether we wish to view "Butterfield 8" in 'Widescreen' or 'Standard' (Fullscreen).
Of course, this DVD release was manufactured in 2000, and 7 years later, we are not often given a choice. If 'Gone With The Wind' can (and is) a full-screen presentation, please do NOT insist that, say,'Valley of The Dolls'-- a guilty pleasure if ever one existed--MUST be available ONLY in letterbox since its release last year-- it ruined an otherwise lovely retro 60's style deluxe DVD issue of it. But that's another review...
THANK YOU, WARNER HOME VIDEO for titles such as 'Butterfield 8' that you offer with both Fullscreen and Widescreen versions available.
Oh, and though I am in the minority, for me Ms. Taylor's performance was even better here, more nuanced, in 'Butterfield 8' than in 'Virginia Woolf'- her 2 Oscar performances. "Butterfield" may be glossy and a tad trashy, but her performance elevates it to ACADEMY AWARD gloss 'n trash :)
(Very good supporting performances here also by the catty friend of the mother of Taylor's character 'Gloria', ditto Dina Merrill; with Eddie Fisher just fine as Gloria's ex-stepbrother, or whatever he is. Also in 'Butterfield 8,'-- 8 years prior to portraying Streisand's mother in 'Funny Girl', Kay Medford has some fun with the role of the proprietor of a motel "Gloria" will visit on occassion...Every occasion she can :)

Liz would seem to have been ideal casting for the role of a defiant call girl, but she didn't like the part: "The role they want me to play is little better than a prostitute," she protested... Most actresses would enjoy the chance to play a B-girl, but Liz never coveted the showy roles, she never played whores or drunks or nuns or aspiring actresses... Her audience wanted to see her in sensational roles, but she preferred being proper...

Rewritten, the edge taken off, John O'Hara's Gloria Wandrous emerges somewhat undefined... The movie is so cautious that it's never clear exactly how the girl makes her living... She models, apparently, but does she get paid for sleeping with men, or does she sleep with men simply because she likes to?

At the height of a family argument, Gloria confesses to her mother that she was the slut of all time, but there is no evidence of this on screen... As in "The Last Time I Saw Paris," Liz--as girl-about-town--is pallid, almost prissy... She doesn't have the freedom to portray amoral characters... She doesn't have the manic self-destructiveness the part requires... The script makes the character another of Taylor's tragic roles: Gloria Wandrous is a woman, mistreated by her man, who dies of unrequited love...

Like the conception of its heroine, the movie is infected with an enervating morality: once a sinner, the message goes, always a sinner... Deep down, this MGM Gloria feels that her indelible history of nights on the town has disqualified her for the likes of a respectable man... Self-convicted as a bad girl, she knows she's doomed... Much more than the novel, the film emphasizes Gloria's lust for respectability... Weston Liggett (Laurence Harvey), the wealthy Yale man, is her one big chance for graduation to the classy life of yachts and weekends in the country... It's as if the character wants to enter the world a younger Taylor so ably embodied in "A Place in the Sun." O'Hara's tough, precise, lovingly detailed novel has been transformed into Metro soap, a lament about a sort of hooker with a persistent desire for suburbia...

But there are moments: the wordless opening scene, Gloria stained and rumpled after a night with Liggett; Gloria trading cracks with her mother's sardonic friend, and with her best friend's girlfriend; Gloria convulsed in tears during an argument with her meek mother (Mildred Dunnock).

Taylor and Laurence Harvey mix like oil and water, but her scenes with Eddie Fisher, who plays her platonic, disapproving buddy are strongly build... Eddie gives her quiet support, the way Montgomery Clift always gave her strength on screen...

Her big scene is her confession to Eddie about how she got started in the life: she was seduced by a house guest when she was thirteen, and she liked it (very wide-eyed, very high-pitched and piercing here), she has always 'liked' it! The confession scene is a Taylor trademark during this period: in "Raintree County," "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," "Suddenly, Last Summer," and here, confessions dramatically lit and photographed are the local points of her performances...

Liz gets the character's self-pity, her sentimentality, her loneliness; she can do the smart answers, the head lifted in defiance... She plays, in short, with an authority that had deepened since "Giant." In "Butterfield 8," she dominates the way a star is supposed to dominate even if, finally, the role lacks definition...

'Butterfield 8' is a movie that is good in the same sense that novels like 'Valley of the Dolls' are good: they are pure, campy fun. Dramatic? Yes. A little soap opera-ish? Maybe. Was this film really worthy of an Oscar? That's debatable but I think Elizabeth Taylor did deserve a heads-up for her portay of Gloria. In another actress's hands this movie could have turned into a disaster but Liz somehow manages to pull it off. Chronicling the life of a call-girl was a risky subject for a major motion picture in 1960. One thing's for sure: this movie is not boring. It will have the viewer hooked from the first minute, wanting to know what will happen next. What is most pleasant about the movie is it does not have a happy ending, which would have made a somewhat cheesy film even cheesier. I enjoy watching movies where the characters are flawed and the undertones are dark and sinister. If you're tired of cheerful, happily-ever after movies then you will probably enjoy this.