The Sandpiper (1965)

I watched 'The Sandpiper' principally for two reasons, one to count towards my goal of watching 12 films this year I had not previously seen featuring Oscar winning songs (in this case the rather beautiful "The Shadow of Your Smile") , and increasing the number of 1965 theatrical releases I've seen (I determined last year that 1965 was the most under represented year in my film knowledge post the 1920's). This movie was co-written by Dalton Trumbo and stared two of the top actors of its time, the husband and wife pair of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. Combine that with the Oscar winning song and I just assumed that this film was well regarded. I was in fact moderately impressed with its quality while watching it, until about the half way through mark when I paused the movie to check something online. There are so few sets and characters in the thing that it occurred to me that it may have been based on a stage play.

In checking online I found that it was not in fact based on a play, and appears to be an original composition for the screen. The movie cost $5 million to make and made more then $13.5 million at the box office. So that's a pretty big hit for the time, I assume the production cost was as high as it was principally to accommodate its stars salaries. However I also found that I was dead wrong as regards the movies general perception of quality. This movie was pretty well hated by critics at the time it came out, and subsequently seems not to have enjoyed a critical reappraisal. It's Rotten Tomato's score is an embarrassing 10%. After looking briefly at some critiques I saw online, upon resuming the film I could see it, the movie is a trite, clichéd melodrama, and in a number of ways rather ridicules.

It is the story of a free spirited artist living on The Big Sur in California (Taylor), who is forced as part of court plea deal to enroll her 9 year old son in a an episcopal boys school in Monterey. She and the boys head master, an episcopal priest (Burton) fall in love, despite their differences including her atheism (a little wild for the mid 60's) and the fact that he is married, to Eva Marie Saint no less. It's an intense love affair, but also a doomed one, life imitating art I suppose. Despite seemingly all the bad things said about the film being basically true, I still rather enjoyed this movie. Somehow it works, and that somehow it principally the chemistry between the leads. They are so good I didn't even notice had "bad" the movie was until it was pointed out to me, they really carry this picture and earn their money here. 'The Sandpiper' is a kind of 'high trash', and that's something I find myself oddly hypnotized by. One other weird thing I learned in relation to this film is that Morgan Mason, the actor who plays Taylor's son, would go on to work in the Reagan White House and marry Belinda Carlisle of The Go-Go's, that couple has been together for more then 30 years, which is better then we can say for Taylor and Burton. ***