Boom! *** (1968, Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Noël Coward) – Classic Movie Review 5842

The making of Boom! is a comedy horror story of posh, intelligent people letting their hair down in public. With all the excesses and extravagancies of the Sixties, maybe it is meant to be funny, just a clever in-joke.

Tennessee Williams’s frankly second-rate play The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore about the ‘Angel of Death’ poet and the dying millionairess becomes a wobbly vehicle for the glamorous, ultra-popular Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton screen team. It is not one of their best movies, though it is still interesting, intriguing, fascinating even.

Taylor plays the supposedly dying Flora ‘Sissy’ Goforth and Burton plays the penniless poet Chris Flanders, a mysterious man who may or may not be the Angel of Death (Angelo Del Morte’, who comes into her life in a large mansion on a secluded island with servants and nurses.

Though both stars seem to be enjoying themselves, they are each upstaged by the grand Italian island setting and the wickedly waspish Noël Coward’s ingratiatingly camp turn as the Witch of Capri.

Director Joseph Losey’s 1968 movie is magnificently self-indulgent, a companion piece to the equally engagingly mindless Modesty Blaise. It is an overblown but captivating Sixties kitsch folly, made at the peak of the Burton-Taylor fame but receiving virtually no cinema bookings.

It is directed with a winning lack of restraint by Losey, apparently relishing overheating Williams’s already overheated play, with the help of the playwright’s own screenplay, but with dialogue mostly lacking in his usual wit. The movie certainly looks smart thanks to the ravishing island location and Douglas Slocombe’s lovely, distinguished Technicolor widescreen cinematography. And there is a score by John Barry, another asset.

Joanna Shimkus plays Miss Black, and also in the cast are Michael Dunn, Romolo Valli, Fernando Piazza and Veronica Wells.

It was filmed on Capo Caccia, Sardinia, Italy, so it looks like a nice holiday for everyone. It was pretty darned costly at $10,000,000.

Taylor immediately re-teamed with Losey for Secret Ceremony.

Burton later re-teamed with Losey for The Assassination of Trotsky.

Taylor enjoyed one of her best chances with Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

Producer John Heyman died on 9 June 2017, aged 84. He was the founder of the London-based International Artists Agency, with clients who included Taylor, Burton, Michael Caine, Richard Harris, Shirley Bassey and Burt Bacharach. He also produced Losey’s The Go-Between (1971). He was the father of Harry Potter producer David Heyman.

© Derek Winnert 2017 Classic Movie Review 5842

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