The Sandpiper * (1965, Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Eva Marie Saint, Charles Bronson) – Classic Movie Review 3184

Vincente Minnelli’s hypnotically absurd and risibly awful Richard Burton-Elizabeth Taylor romantic melodrama The Sandpiper (1965) was made at the height of their fame when they had the pick of scripts. But they picked this one! In incautious, infelicitous casting, Taylor plays Laura Reynolds, an artistic hippy free-spirited single unmarried mother, and Burton is Dr Edward Hewitt, the Californian married preacher-head teacher of an Episcopal boarding school, who falls for her.

This expensive flop of a movie for MGM is a great big pretentious mess, which dented everybody’s reputations and careers – not least director Minnelli’s. Taylor is the mother of one of Burton’s pupils and the stars clash over her son’s education before romping between the sheets. Taylor flutters her huge eyelashes and then flutters with a symbolically injured bird.

Burton meanwhile gets to battle with the world’s most unusual sculptor – Charles Bronson as Cos Erickson – while Eva Marie Saint looks lost too as Burton’s hapless wife, Claire Hewitt. The best things about it are the Big Sur locations and the Oscar-winning Best Original Song, ‘The Shadow of Your Smile’, by Johnny Mandel (music) and Paul Francis Webster (lyrics). Mandel also won a Grammy for Best Original Score.

Burton’s performance isn’t a patch on his similar role in The Night of the Iguana (1964). Sad to say The Sandpiper is written by blacklisted Dalton Trumbo and Michael Wilson, two of the best screen-writers in the business, with the story by Martin Ransohoff and adaptation by Irene and Louis Kamp. Critically bashed though it was, it did make money, however, thanks to the stars’ incredible popularity and bankability. On a cost of $5,300,000, it took $14,000,000 worldwide.

Also in the cast are Robert Webber, Torin Thatcher, Morgan Mason, James Edwards, Doug Henderson and Tom Drake.

RIP Johnny Mandel, Oscar-winning Best Original Song composer of ‘The Shadow of Your Smile’ in The Sandpiper (1965), who died on 29 June 2020, aged 94.

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© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 3184

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