Joseph Losey (1968)
A deservedly forgotten adaptation of what is (if this is anything to go by) one of Tennessee Williams’s lesser stage plays, The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore (1963). Elizabeth Taylor is Mrs Goforth, the egomaniac owner of a Sardinian island. Her strident verbal bullying of her house staff, the locals, and house guests is punctuated by apprehensions of meaninglessness and the void. Mrs Goforth’s occasional panic attacks are meant to liven things up. Richard Burton, who trespasses onto her property, is Christopher Flanders, aka the Angel of Death. (Flanders is a poet: is the implication that it’s the writer’s job to create a memento mori through his art?) Boom! is very bad indeed: at first, listless and opaque; then – once it’s clear what the film is about – obvious and boring.
There’s no doubt that the source material is the root cause of the failure but Joseph Losey’s approach makes matters worse. With his ability to communicate – through the intensity of his imagery and an intuitive relationship with his actors – the depth of his personal engagement with existential questions and fear of death, Ingmar Bergman might have been able to make something engrossing of this material, though it would probably have been a challenge even for him. Boom! is sometimes photographed (by Douglas Slocombe) as if Losey were aiming for Bergman’s visual expressiveness but the funereal pacing makes no sense when Losey is working, not with a spare, laconic script, but with Tennessee Williams dialogue, the inherent vivacity of which demands that the actors connect in a way that never happens here (except that Taylor seems momentarily relieved when she finally gets to see Burton). Maybe the pauses between lines are supposed to suggest the ‘vacant interstellar spaces’ of eternity. They last long enough. During these silences, I got to wondering about how the variously talented people responsible for this fiasco had got involved. Taylor and Burton can thank Williams for some of their best screen roles (she in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Suddenly, Last Summer, he in Night of the Iguana) – perhaps they did it for old times’ sake. You can almost imagine Williams mailing in his screenplay with a note to Losey, ‘Will this do?’ John Barry seems to have supplied the music in a similar spirit (‘Here are some bits I left out of my proper film scores. You’re free to use them if you like’).
Apart from Taylor, who sometimes gets into a bitchy (solo) rhythm and is intermittently funny when she’s insulting people, the acting is terrible. Burton, who looks the worse for wear, understandably seems to be struggling to stay awake much of the time. (As the film dragged on, I realised that he was too old for his role and Taylor too young for hers.) Losey appears to assume that Noel Coward (he plays a gossipy denizen of Capri who pays Taylor a call) will, by definition, deliver his lines with superb and effortless precision. Coward’s timing seemed to me appalling. The goldenly beautiful Joanna Shimkus, as Mrs Goforth’s secretary, is exceptionally inept. I’d guess that in the original this character is the unsophisticated, passionately honest polar opposite of the rich, sophisticated harridan who employs her. Shimkus isn’t just unable to convey emotion. She seems to struggle even to change position; she takes up a pose at the start of an exchange with Taylor or Burton and seems to be waiting for Losey to tell her what to do next. It’s a wonder she ever got another role (although not much happened for her after The Virgin and the Gypsy, made a couple of years later and the only thing I’ve previously seen her in).
‘Boom’ is the noise of the sea, its thudding vastness a reminder of mortality; Burton’s quietly resonant intonation of this one word makes his presence in the film worthwhile. (I don’t know if this is in the stage play, which, according to Wikipedia, has an Italian setting – but it’s not clear whether an island one.) In this marine context anyway, the noise of the sea and the repeated reference in the script to ‘The shock of each moment of still being alive’ recalls the imagery of the (1959) Plath poem ‘Suicide off Egg Rock’ (‘Sun struck the water like a damnation … And his blood beating the old tattoo/I am, I am, I am … A machine to breathe and beat for ever … He heard when he walked into the water/The forgetful surf creaming on those ledges’).
6 November 2008
