Now Over 5500 Reviews and (near) Daily Updates!

WELCOME! Use the search engines on this site (or your own off-site engine of choice) to gain easy access to the complete MAKSQUIBS Archive; more than 5500 posts and counting. (New posts added every day or so.)

You can check on all our titles by typing the Title, Director, Actor or 'Keyword' you're looking for in the Search Engine of your choice (include the phrase MAKSQUIBS) or just use the BLOGSPOT.com Search Box at the top left corner of the page.

Feel free to place comments directly on any of the film posts and to test your film knowledge with the CONTESTS scattered here & there. (Hey! No Googling allowed. They're pretty easy.)

Send E-mails to MAKSQUIBS@yahoo.com . (Let us know if the TRANSLATE WIDGET works!) Or use the Profile Page or Comments link for contact.

Thanks for stopping by.

Monday, July 31, 2017

THE SANDPIPER (1965)

At peak commercial cachet, and positively bloated with glamour, Dick & Liz (that’d be Burton & Taylor) are fabulous (in the mythical sense) & embarrassing in producer Martin Ransohoff’s iniquitous surf-side romance. The whole ludicrous package pulled from his ‘original’ story,’ which turns out to be a gloss on Somerset Maugham’s RAIN. (The one about the hypocritical minister who falls for a sexual, free-spirited woman.) Massaged into shape by pricey scripters Dalton Trumbo & Michael Wilson, it juggles scenic California exterior locations with studio interiors shot on Paris soundstages. (To help keep the tax-man away.) Vincente Minnelli & lenser Milton Krasner find some good angles on La Liz (she alternates between startlingly pretty and blobby under hide-it-all ponchos by Irene Sharaff), playing a bohemian artist living in a beachfront lean-to that might pass as a Pier One store. But when her son is ordered to attend an elite private religious school, Reverend Burton starts hand-delivering status reports, and succumbs to baser instincts. Taylor's odd acting choices have her flying off the handle at the drop of a hat when not holding things up for a proto-feminist speech; then snuggling down for post-coital musing with a wounded sandpiper nesting in her hair. Eva Marie Saint is around for contrast as Burton’s ‘B’-cup wife, unable to compete with the Taylor mammaries. In a famous howler of a shot, Liz modestly covers up with too petite hands when Dick interrupts a posing session for Charles Bronson’s sculptor. All this plus Beach Front Hootennanies; never-ending cool-jazz variations on Johnny Mandel’s ‘The Shadow of Your Smile;’ and a final bittersweet resolution. Lordy, what a show.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Listen up as Liz imagines a solitary life like Robinson Caruso, the world-famous tenor castaway.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK: Dick & Liz are infinitely more fun in their previous guilty pleasure THE V.I.P.s/’63.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/06/vips-1963.html

No comments: