BUTTERFIELD 8

Liz Taylor and Laurence Harvey

BUTTERFIELD 8 (1960). Director: Daniel Mann.

"Every awful moment of it, I Loved!" -- Gloria.

Gloria Wandrous (Elizabeth Taylor) is a model and good-time girl who has a male best friend, Steve (Eddie Fisher), who may be in love with her, to the consternation of his girlfriend, Norma (Susan Oliver). Gloria begins an affair with an unhappily married man named Weston Liggett (Laurence Harvey of Summer and Smoke) and is convinced that her sordid liquor-and-sex past is over, that she has found true love at last. But there is still the wife, Emily (Dina Merrill) to deal with, and more than one ugly misunderstanding ...

Eddie Fisher and La Liz

Butterfield 8 is undoubtedly a sanitized, cliff notes version of John O'Hara's 1935 novel, and has apparently been updated to the late 1950's. Gloria is not an especially sympathetic character (nor Weston) until she reveals to Steve what happened to her in her childhood in a powerful sequence. Like something out of Harvey's film Room at the Top, Weston has apparently married for a good job and social position, although his wife seems to blame her own family for making things too easy for him. Taylor gives a very good performance, and won an Oscar for her portrayal. Harvey is also excellent, and there's good work from Merrill, Oliver, Kay Medford as a motel proprietor, Carmen Mathews as Emily's mother, and especially Mildred Dunnock as Gloria's mother and Betty Field as her very blunt best friend, Frances. Eddie Fisher, who was married to Taylor at the time (after leaving Debbie Reynolds for her), gives a respectable performance.

Verdict: Good performances and some good dialogue lift this a notch above the soap opera level. ***. 

FROM THE TERRACE

FROM THE TERRACE (1960). Director: Mark Robson.

"I guess he hated me so much he couldn't even stand to be alive on the day I got married."

Alfred Eaton (Paul Newman) has always been in the shadow of his older brother who died, and has a terrible relationship with his father, Samuel (Leon Ames), who berates his neglected wife, Martha (Myrna Loy) for her drinking and her adulterous affair. Eaton's bad luck continues when he marries Mary (Joanne Woodward), who still has a big thing for old boyfriend Jim (Patrick O'Neal), but things look up when he meets Natalie Benzinger (Ina Balin). The trouble is that Eaton's boss thinks infidelity is worse than a divorce, Mary has no desire to stop being Mrs. Eaton, and Alfred has to choose between true love and his career. Newman saunters through the movie with aplomb and has several good moments, Woodward is sexy and interesting, Balin is lovely [if perhaps too understated at times], and Loy almost walks off with the picture as Alfred's lonely and alcoholic mother. Ames plays against type and is quite effective. This entertaining study and dissection of the American dream was based--probably loosely -- on a novel by John O'Hara. Nice score by Elmer Bernstein.

Verdict: Reasonably absorbing slice of Americana with some good performances. ***.