Didn't Care For It Watch: BUtterfield 8 (1960)

Watched:  08/23/2024

Format:  Max

Viewing:  First

Director:  Daniel Mann

Selection;  Jamie, but following my thread that we should try this movie sometime from a week ago

Look, I'm the first person to start lecturing people about how you need to watch a movie from two points of view - (1) the context you bring to it, and (2) the context in which it was made and released.  You sorta need to think of it like watching the customs of another country and trying to incorporate their point of view to appreciate a visit there.  So, it's part and parcel of watching classic film that one will see outdated concepts, racism, sexism, etc...  Our forebears' ways are not the ways of our current norms.

And, yet...  BUtterfield 8 (1960)  is a rough ride.  

It's the sort of thing we'd treat like a punching dummy or pinata in film criticism by the 1990's - so by 2024, it feels super strange.  The culture that spawned the film is on life support or hospice - with some geniuses still thinking this era was somehow golden.  But, yeah, it's essentially a movie in which all the bad habits of virgin/ whore dichotomies are the skeleton upon which the story hangs and this story very much about women is always secretly about the needs of one man - and a horrible man at that.

You will not be surprised to learn that this is based on a novel (sort of*) written by a man, with a screenplay by men and directed by a man.  And while Elizabeth Taylor's character, Gloria, is the central character - while I'm aware the 1950's were the 1950's and things were different while this was being made - I am pretty sure this movie is still mostly about punishing women for wanting things, including sex not tied to marriage.  But I'm not sure anyone working on the movie was conscious of this.

The movie is about a "model", Gloria (Elizabeth Taylor), who spends her nights going around town basically being hot in fancy clothes for the entertainment of wealthy men.  She has a rich history sleeping her way through these men - which is explicitly stated by everyone, especially Gloria.  However, we never see this Gloria - we see her as she's fallen for Liggett, a wealthy executive, played by Laurence Harvey.**  She has a best friend in singer/ actor Eddie Fisher (Carrie's dad), whose girlfriend does not like him palling around with a woman (she is one of the two blonde pure women in the film).  

Oh, "BUtterfield 8" would have made sense to contemporary audiences as it was how you reached a phone exchange.  The B and U are basically 2 and 8, and then folks would have just said 8 for the third digit.  It's also the name of the agency that sent Gloria out on jobs.

Taylor lives with her mother, whose best friend is the best character in the movie, just constantly dragging Gloria.  But the two have an absolutely toxic relationship they doll up by just lying to one another constantly and knowingly.

Basically, Liggett was not always rich, he married money in the form of Dina Merrill - and there are worse fates, friendos.  But if he ever loved Dina Merrill, he's forgotten, trapped by the world of (choke) money and an easy job and a wife who seems pretty great.  While she visits her mother, in a mere week, he and Gloria fall for each other, but don't quite figure out how to be together when Merrill comes home.  

On paper, I guess I understood what was happening, but it felt like someone yadda-yadda'd over why everyone was in the state they were in.  That turn into the third act is a mess from a modern perspective, but probably made perfect sense to respectable middle-class folks in Eisenhower's America.

SPOILERS 

Kind of out of nowhere, Gloria delivers a speech to Eddie Fisher about how she was abused by her mother's boyfriend for a week straight when she was 13, and this is why she's now a tramp.  And there's sooooo much to unpack there, it's nuts.  Curiously, it's also apparently part of a true-life crime the novel was based on.  So.  Man, I dunno.

It context of this movie, it feels super fucked up and not in the way they intended.

Y'all buckle in, because the film ends with Gloria deciding to move to Boston, away from Liggett and the life she had.  Liggett has decided to divorce Merrill and pursue Gloria - despite the fact it's clear she doesn't want him to.  And yet...   Liggett finds her, but at the last second she runs away.  So he pursues her, forcing her to drive unsafely and she dies.  Because she had sex with a man.  And he was basically emotionally battering her into being with him.  

I hated this movie a lot - but I think Jamie was going to melt the couch with her white-hot fury.  

This movie wound up winning Taylor an Academy Award which is bizarre.  She hated this movie before making it, and she hated it her whole life.  Good for you, Liz.  

this is literally 2 minutes after she woke up

The movie is not horny, really, but it is as laden with sex and non-stop implicit discussion of sex as anything I've seen from pre-1970.  All while basking in the 1950's-era conservativism tied to sex, who gets to have it, and what kind of girls have it who aren't wives.  And I imagine Taylor was seen as bold and daring for both playing this character and delivering her 3rd act speech.  She's fine, but it's all so clunky.  

I won't ignore that this movie puts Taylor on display from jump, sharing Taylor in just a slip for the film's first few, dialog-free minutes.  And it rarely takes its foot off the gas in that regard. 

BUtterfield 8 (1960) absolutely has to be one of the things Matthew Weiner had in mind when he was assembling Mad Men, which was a modern (in the 10's) story about the 1960's, and so knew what it was doing and saying, using the period's standards to comment on the present and past.  But it's hard to look at the sets, the styling, the drinking, the carousing and distant husband with the picture-perfect society wife who just wants satisfaction - and not see the spark of the idea.  

Anyway, I'd heard this movie was not great, and it wasn't.  It's a purple prose melodrama, full of bizarre dialog and moments people really thought were going to be amazing that, instead, feel wooden when they aren't leaden.  I hated all of the characters by the film's end - partially because no one feels like they're making anything like human decisions or taking human actions - they're just following the grand design of the omniscient melodrama-maker.  

I absolutely could not believe the movie ended with Liggett returning to his wife, clearly no longer looking for a divorce.  He does not ask for forgiveness after essentially ruining her life and then killing Gloria.  Instead, he says "I have to find myself.  You wait here." and departs.  It is the grossest thing I've seen in a movie in a decade.

There's actually plenty more to break down, but I won't.  I'm done.  This movie was not my jam.

Also, Eddie Fisher is one of those actors you think "this was probably fine for TV, but in the context here..."***

*I saw that the movie was based on a novel, but what I didn't know was that the novel was based on the real-life unresolved and mysterious case of the death of Starr Faithfull, a flapper and - according to wikipedia - a real piece of work

**Holy shit.  This guy had a crazy life, but I also found out that his daughter was the real-life inspiration for the 2005 film Domino

***like most folks my age, all I know about Eddie Fisher is that he dumped Debbie Reynolds for Taylor - leaving Carrie and her brother behind and Debbie to raise kids on her own.  So I can only laugh when, a few years later, he called home and Richard Burton picked up and was blunt about why he was there.