The Blue Bird (1976) and Violet Links

The news of Liz Taylor's death derailed me this morning as Twitter exploded. Though I am less nostalgic as a person than I appear to be on the web  (I think it's that love of Oscar history and "anniversary" post-fetish that makes me seem like a weepy 'they don't make 'em like they used to' type.), this month has been admittedly nostalgia-saturated. We shall return to stuff in theaters very soon.

As I was posting about Liz and sharing reader of the day "first movie" memories I began to wonder when my Liz fandom began? I have no specific recall like I do with some stars. My earliest vivid pop culture memories  from childhood are mostly bunched around the axis of The Muppets, Star Wars and Natalie Wood (television airings of her old movies) in the late 70s. So I was looking at Liz's filmography and realized the first time I saw her must have been in the family film The Blue Bird. I remember zero about the movie other than her face... which is weird because Jane Fonda, Cicely Tyson and Ava Gardner are also in it though obvs I didn't yet know who they were... except for maybe Fonda.  I'm actually shocked to remember that my parents took us to this because in my house (my parents are right wingers) Jane Fonda was a 'traitorous devil' or some such. In all my years of film fandom I have never heard anyone talk about this movie and I had forgotten its existence myself so maybe it's not on DVD?

My favorite tweet about Liz this morning was this one, from diminutive comedienne Selene Luna. She has a perceptive papa.

Carefully Taylor'ed Memories
The Guardian explains Liz Taylor's Gay Icon status beautifully.
The Guardian Guy Lodge looks back over her career in clips.
Playbill remembers the Dame's stage outings with a photo gallery.
Boy Culture remembers her wild rollercoaster of a career and imagines how, to the generations before us -- particular those who grew up with her growing up alongside them onscreen, she must be even more intimately revered.

Fun Liz-Links To Dry Those Wet Eyes
Movie|Line shares the most memorable Elizabeth Taylor cameos. This is how many younger viewers became familiar with her from the 80s onward.
Movie|Line also has a fun post on Liz's most OTT acting.
Acidemic admires her generosity of spirit and sexuality. And like The Film Experience, Acidemic doesn't just post about her on the day of her death.
Awards Daily Sasha names her 10 favorites
La Dolce Musto Michael Musto names his 5 favorites with a good note on Cleopatra's reputation.
The Star remembers a trip Liz & Dick (Richard Burton) took to Toronto in the 60s... with photos.
The Montreal Gazette has wedding photos from their marriage in Montreal.

My 5 (okay 6) Favorites
Since Sasha and Musto listed their fav Liz performances, I'd feel remiss if I didn't.

1. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
2. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
3. Butterfield 8 -(post coming next month for the Oscar anniversary.)
   
   
4. Giant and Suddenly Last Summer
   (Tie. I toggle back and forth. I haven't seen either of them in about 5 years. But I love that she does the same thing for both films in a way as the pivot point between two very different acting styles from two also legendary screen stars in a tense triangle of this-movie-can't-be-real star power.)
5. A Place in the Sun -here's a previous writeup on this.

Those are the biggies for me but I should note that I have seen neither The VIPs nor Boom, both of which I've wanted to see for some time. There's never enough of it! (Time, that is.)

Reader of the Day: Dominique

For today's reader interview we have the lovely movie-mad Dominique who lives here in New York.

Nathaniel: Do you remember your first ever moviegoing experience?

DOMINIQUE: The first film I remember seeing in theaters is Disney's Beauty and the Beast. I would've been a little over 5. My dad had been reading an abridged version of it as a bedtime story and so I kept wondering how they could make a whole movie out of a ten-page picture book. I guess I assumed the film would be pretty short or something. Naturally, I was blown away and it remains a favorite film of mine until this day.

When did you start reading The Film Experience?

I think it was around 2007.  I'm attracted to how unpretentious the site is. All the writers and collaborators seem to genuinely love film and I can feel that in every article. I also love random features such as First and Last or April Showers/May Flowers... Just little tidbits of cinephilia that are always refreshing. Also I'm an Oscar nut.

Have you ever dressed up as a movie character for Halloween? 

I am a Halloween lover and have been dressing up as pop culture characters for the past few years: Mia Wallace, Becky from Sin City, Holly Golightly, Joan Holloway, Sherrie from Rock of Ages and this year Lisbeth Salander.

Want Pictures! Which film genre do you think needs a little time out and why? And the inverse: What kind of movie do you wish they'd start making more of?

I'm not sure what genre needs a time out. I'm pretty open to everything and I think some great filmmakers can convince me to watch something I assume I won't like. If anything, maybe certain filmmakers need to take a little time off. Tim Burton, anyone? (Here's another reason I will keep reading this site: no one managed to describe why I hate Eyesore in Wonderland quite as well as you did, Nathaniel.)

What I want to see more of are good musicals. I have always loved musicals and I am thankful to live in New York where I always have the opportunity to go see something great on (or off) Broadway. But what about in film? Is Burlesque really the best we can do? It was silly, but it was no Moulin Rouge! and that's what I want more of. Something epic. If the godawful Glee can remain this popular, can't musicals have a comeback with a film that's actually good?

I'm a film student and they always tell us to make the films we want to see. Two years ago I wrote and produced a musical comedy short and my thesis project which I will be shooting later this year is a dark musical. So at least I'm trying to work on the problem.

 
Best Wishes... sincerely. Let's end with your three favorites actresses. Who they be?

Marlene Dietrich, Barbara Stanwyck and Kate Winslet. Of course, ask me any other day and my answers would probably change.

I just love women who don't take shit from men. And then seduce them.

79 Ways To Celebrate The Life of Elizabeth Taylor

In lieu of a traditional obituary, and because I'm still working on two other Taylor posts that were started before this sad news, I thought a major revision of a two year-old birthday post was in order. If you're in need of comfort today, wrap yourself up in this legend's grandiosity on this disheartening day. Take Taylor's life as inspiration. Survive Everything... but for death, of course, which will come for us all. But leave a legacy behind you and you've got that beat, too.

79 Ways to Celebrate Liz Taylor's Legacy in 2011
How many can you do this year?

1. Be great.
2. Be beautiful.
3. Be ambitious. Quoth Liz "It's not the having, it's the getting."
4. Be a legend in your own mind, and in others.
5. Get married. Or divorced. Or remarried. Or all three. Or several times.
6. Let your passions rule you.
7. Act like a diva. (But back it up with substance... nobody likes a vacuous primadonna.)
8. Wear something spectacularly sexy, preferrably white.
9. Make people want more.
10. Forge unbreakable friendships.
11. Stick with those people through tragedies, scandals, and anything else that besets them.
12. Watch Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?.
    
    
    
13. Invite people over for copious drinking party.
14. Play "get the guests" or "hump the hostess", your choice.
15. (If you don't have a child, invent one.)
16. Watch National Velvet. 
17. Go horseback riding.
18. Watch A Place in the Sun.
19. "Tell mama everything"
20. Fall in love with Montgomery Clift in glorious black and white (any of his movies will do).
    
    
21. Ask your best friend to refer to you as "Bessie Mae" for the rest of the year.
22. Demand a Taylor retrospective at your local arthouse cinema. Suggest that they donate a portion of the proceeds to Liz's charity.
23. Be highly quotable.
24. Flaunt every piece of jewelry you own. (Maybe wear them all at once?)
25. Donate to an AIDS charity. Per Liz's request in lieu of flowers.
26. Nurse a sick friend or loved one.
27. Enjoy your own wicked sense of humor. Laugh loudly at good jokes.
28. Scream "I was the slut of all time!" with style and at the top of your lungs. Shamelessness suits you.
29. Watch Butterfield 8.
30. Fight for that performance's reputation (It's better than Oscar mythology claims. But more on that in April for the 50th anniversary of her win.)
31. Write something pity or bitchy on a mirror in lipstick. "NO SALE"
32. Survive the loss of someone you loved no matter how hard that is to do. If you're still grieving find a way to make that sadness productive.
33. Pretend you've won an Oscar.
    
    
    
    
34. And another. (Or work at actually deserving one if you're in showbiz). Better yet...
35. ...deserve the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award.
36. Drink people under the table.
37. Polish La Liz's star at 6336 Hollywood Blvd.
38. Watch Cleopatra...(okay, half of it. It's so long!).
39. Make memorable entrances (if you're rolled in a carpet, have a safe word handy.)
40. Read "Elizabeth".
41. Watch the original Father of the Bride.
42. Buy a pair of violet contact lenses or just play up your natural eye color's beauty.
43. Paint a beauty mark on your right upper jaw.
44. Don't take yourself too seriously.
45. Role play "Liz and Dickie" with your boyfriend / girlfriend. H-O-T.
46. Name perfumes after your favorite things.
47. Monetize your favorite things.
48. Love dogs (and other animals).
    
    
49. Be a "Functioning Voluptuary"... enjoy the finer things in life.
50. Gain lots of weight or lose some -- it doesn't matter; you're still fabulous.
51. Stop worrying about getting older (Liz didn't); you're still fabulous.
52. Watch Giant.
53. Watch Suddenly Last Summer.
54. Speak the truth with a ferocity of spirit. Even if it makes uptight people want to cut your brain up to stop your "hatchet tongue"
55. Get familiar with the entire Tennesse Williams oeuvre. It suits the remarkable dramatic women (and sure suited La Liz who went there four times).
56. Watch Boom.
57. Watch Reflections in a Golden Eye.
58. Steal something from someone who reminds you of Debbie Reynolds.
    
    
    
    
59. But bury the hatchet with your enemies.
60. Give them something to talk about when you leave the room.
61. Photoshop yourself onto the cover of 14 People magazines.
62. Watch The Flintstones.
63. Watch Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
64. Make sure you're enticing in your underwear.
65. Descend into "erotic vagrancy"!
    
    
    
66. Watch The Taming of the Shrew.
67. Imagine how Sherilyn Fenn might play you in a TV movie.
68. Study Kabbalah.
69. Excite the tabloids.
70. Inspire other artists.
    
    
    
    
71. Add a "Dame" before your name on Facebook.
72. Make your speaking voice so memorable that The Simpsons want you.
73. Work towards making lots of "all time greatest" lists in whatever it is that you do and actually deserve the honor.
74. Make the world a better place.
75. Survive whatever illnesses beset you (tracheotomy, pneumonia, cancer, hip replacements, you name it.)
76. Next time you throw your back out, spend that time catching up on old movie classics.
77. Call yourself "Mother Courage" and mean it.
78. Survive everything...
79. Even death; leave great work behind you and live on.

Elizabeth Taylor, "Functioning Voluptuary" (RIP)

A very sad morning it is. I am loathe to report that Elizabeth Taylor, has passed away at the age of 79. While I gather my thoughts -- I am genuinely upset at the moment, Liz having been one of my favorite people in the universe my whole life -- please enjoy this beautiful tribute from Paul Newman, another lost great, to one of the most important stars of all time.

or check out the gallery section to enjoy her beauty.

Tennessee 100: "Suddenly Last Summer"

Robert A. here (of Distant Relatives). When Nathaniel asked us to pick a Tennessee Williams based film and write about it, my first instinct was the pick something I’d seen again and again and thus could write with authority. Unfortunately all of those films were quickly scooped up and I thought, why not take the opportunity to explore one I’d always wanted to see but hadn’t gotten around to. Why did I want to see Suddenly, Last Summer?

Well...

Of course, Tennessee Williams films are often saturated in dripping sexuality.

Cue the crotchety old man in me saying “In my day, when films couldn’t show two people hopping in the sack, they were sexier.”  But in the case of Williams, it’s true. Consider shirtless desperate Marlon Brando shouting out for his lover in Streetcar or Eli Wallach seducing Carrol Baker in Baby Doll. This wasn’t every day sexuality winkingly eluded to to get past the censors. This was dangerous stuff.

Which finally brings me to Suddenly, Last Summer which stars Montgomery Clift as a psychiatrist hired by Katharine Hepburn to analyze, diagnose (and lobotomize) Elizabeth Taylor who has been hopelessly manic since witnessing the sudden death of her cousin Sebastian (Hepburn’s loving son) "last summer".

death haunts those conversations about last summer.

Made just a year after Cat on a Hot Tin Roof had every suggestion of Brick’s homosexuality purged, and knowing writer Gore Vidal claimed the studios made him do much of the same I went in expecting no less. Perhaps the innocence of the 50’s was still in full swing but from Taylor’s blunt declaration that Sebastian used she and his mother as “decoys” to attract desperate men, to the production design which covered Sebastian’s study with pictures and sculptures of naked men, the “undertones” seemed more like overtones.

To be gay would be shocking enough for audiences in 1959. But Sebastian’s predatory nature and the details of his grizzly murder add up to a kind of vampire sexuality where characters are at the complete whims of their urges, easily seduced, uncontrollably impassioned, set in a world explicitly characterized as one where the chaos of nature has free reign and we’re all victims in the making waiting to be devoured. My introduction to Suddenly, Last Summer was also my initiation into the most shocking of Tennessee Williams.

not the kind of action Sebastian was looking for

Suddenly Last Summer is actually a one-act play and, as such was not a Broadway outing for Tennessee in it's original run, double billed with another one-act. The film version won 3 Oscar nominations (art direction and a double Best Actress for Taylor and Hepburn. They lost to Simone Signoret in Room at the Top) There are no other feature film versions though there was a televised BBC production in the 90s with Maggie Smith (Emmy nominated), Rob Lowe, Richard E Grant and Natasha Richardson.