1968’s Boom! Is largely remembered today for being a colossal bomb at the box office, an aspect of it some people seem to enjoy in a spirit of schadenfreude. One cannot help but consider how the title was a prophesy foretold, though I personally think it is better than the original name of the Tennessee Williams play from which this was adapted, and that is The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore.
John Waters is a huge fan of the picture, and his lively commentary accommodating it on the Shout Factory blu-ray is even better than watching the film proper. But I’m not sure if he genuinely enjoys the movie or if he only enjoys it in an ironic, camp manner. Admittedly, there is a great deal of camp here, both intentional and seemingly unintentional, with some elements successful and others not. It is a mess, but not in the ways I thought it would be, and somehow both more enjoyable and more boring than I thought possible.
I think the one thing we can all agree on is it is the definition of pretentiousness. The title cards are in that font used for the Prisoner TV series and, as much as I am a fan of that, that is also very smug. Get a load of this single screen of text following the names of Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton and Noël Coward: “in the John Heyman production of Joseph Losey’s BOOM by Tennessee Williams”. Why is the last line on the screen longer than the others, and is that why this was supposedly the author’s favorite of the film adaptations of his works?
I know I was wondering what drew Taylor to this project. She plays a wealthy but sickly woman who lives on an island she owns outright, and where her word is law. It is a performance with much screaming and berating of her staff, and I couldn’t help but feel some of it may have been Taylor behaving like a diva which the cameras rolled without her knowledge. It is hard to believe a line like “shit on your mother!” was scripted, yet even harder to believe it might have ad-libbed by Taylor.
The recipient of much of her anger is Joanna Shimkus as her long-suffering secretary. Taylor is forever dictating her memoirs for her to transcribe. Sometimes this is in person, other times through an intercom system and, in one instance, through a loudspeaker system so everybody seemingly anywhere on her estate can hear it.
Some of that feels weirdly relevant to the actress herself, and I wondered if that, if anything, drew her to the project. Consider: “My name has been in lights since scarcely more than a child. Then marriage to five industrial kings, all who had vast fortunes which, according to the looks of them, they deposited in their fat bellies”.
If she was going to be even partly playing herself, she could have at least brought her own jewelry. There is an extreme close-up of a ring with a huge rock on it that looked so patently artificial that even I could tell it was a fake.
She almost might have considered bringing her own wardrobe, though we would be deprived of one of the most fascinating and bizarre aspects of the production. The outfits alone aren’t as outlandish as the headpieces, one of which I can only described as the “exploding Death Star”, and the first glimpse of it completely stops all thought more completely than anything else I can recall ever seeing on the screen. Imagine if somebody cored a frozen pineapple, put that in the middle of a flower arrangement, sat the whole mess on Liz’s head like a hat, then tried to Scanners her, tough only succeeding in exploding what was on her head.
Unfortunately for Richard Burton, she will also pick out his wardrobe. This is how he ends up wearing a Samurai robe, complete with sword, for the remainder of the runtime. Still, that might have been the least ridiculous option, given the brief glimpse that we get of other possible selections from the two packed closets she explores.
Burton’s clothes when he arrived weren’t all that great, either, and they were destroyed by guard dogs when he snuck onto Taylor’s island. Not being a dog person, I’m not sure of the breed of those dogs, but they looked like Scottish Terriers, only larger. They didn’t exactly look like killers. Regardless, Taylor decrees a sign be put on the beach saying to beware of dogs, and to put that in three languages. Oh, and also Arabic, as that apparently is not a language.
Why Burton is there is a bit of a mystery for a while, but it is no surprise he is revealed to be the angel of death. This information is first conveyed in visit from Taylor’s token gay friend, Noel Coward. That his character is named “The Witch of Capri” is yet another sign of how irritating this whole enterprise can be at most times. He seems to exist solely so he and Liz can bitch at each other, and she has an audience to appreciate such bon mots as “I went into the doctor’s for a regular checkup. They were disgusted by my good health.” That Coward arrived on the shoulders of a boy toy shows it can still be surprisingly and distinctively funny at times. That he and Taylor call to each other in owl-like “hoo-hoo”’s is another further inanity, but it does give Burton the opportunity to say “I don’t speak bird language.”
It seems given a dwarf will be among Taylor’s staff, with Michael Dunn as her head of security. That he was in Otto Preminger’s Ship of Fools means this isn’t the worst movie he’s been in.
The set that is Liz’s clifftop mansion is fascinating and it is largely the reason to see this film. A story, likely apocryphal, says Taylor tried to buy the place to live in after filming completed, though it is a non-functional set. Roughly 75% of the picture seems to take place on a massive terrace. The house proper is almost like something sculpted by enormous hands, and is in a style reminiscent of Gaudi. Actually, something about the place feels like was made for a giant, with two rough windows in one room feeling like eye holes in a mask for one to look out over the sea. Also, there are giant heads scattered on the grounds, as if the Easter Islanders made it to Europe.
I am bewildered as to what purpose those serve, as well as almost every aspect of this production beyond that. Some of the weird is interesting, but almost all of it feels like weird for its own sake. Even the movie seems to mock its incomprehensibility at times, such as the mynah bird which asks, “Who?” and “What?” At one point, Burton starts reciting Coleridge’s “Kubla Kahn” and Taylor reacts with a hilarious, braying, “WHAAAAAAT?!”
I still have yet to see Taylor deliver a less than fully committed performance, yet I wonder what she thought she was doing this time. If her character is only meant to be grumpy and frequently exasperated, then mission accomplished. That she and Burton decided to make this after surviving Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? feels like the tempestuous couple was itching for a disaster to happen.
Really, every person in this had to be frustrated to some extent, given how each seems to be acting at each other instead of with each other. Various facial expressions seemed to be used by different people at any time apparently at random, or at least without any provocation or in obvious relation to what event or line immediately preceded it.
That was the most curious aspect of Monica Vitti’s performance in Modesty Blaise, a widely unloved movie I happen to enjoy a great deal, and which was also helmed by Joseph Losey. While that film was also overlong, it at least gets weirder as it goes along. Unfortunately, the inverse happens here, with the first hour being enjoyably batshit crazy, before becoming an interminable slog in the second. Get a load of this line that seems to be the film critiquing itself: “What the hell are we doing? Going from one frantic distraction to another.”
That back half is where we get to the allegedly serious issues at the core of the material, but those topics are slim pickings. I wasn’t sensing many big ideas, but one of the few I did concerned life being a series of moments, the infinitesimally small “now” that becomes past as soon as it is perceived. As expressed by Taylor: “Has it ever occurred to you that life is all memory? That each present moment goes by so quickly you hardly catch it?” This seems to be the overarching theme of the work, or it is at least how the title is shoehorned in, per a long speech from Burton at the end, of which this is part: “BOOM. The shock of each moment of still being alive. When a wave breaks upon a rock.” Oh, and there is a shit-ton of footage of waves breaking upon rocks at the base of a cliff through the runtime. That is also all we will hear over the end credits, just to ensure the film finishes in as insufferably faux-intellectual a manner as possible. As for myself, the titular onomatopoeia will be associated with Taylor’s exploding pineapple hat.
They could have used more of John Barry’s score. Initially, I thought it was going to be as bizarre as every other element here. Things don’t bode well when you hear calliope music. But then that is incorporated into a larger and more interesting tune with an unusual arrangement. I was even amused when Taylor silences the soundtrack with the push of a button. I guess it is her island, so she will have final say over its soundtrack.
There is some merit to Boom!, but the extent of the enjoyment one might find in it will vary greatly from one person to another. It is a struggle to watch and analyze, and I can’t imagine anyone being fully satisfied with it. It may have been a massive critical and box office failure at the time, but I guess it says something if the author of the source material enjoyed it that much. And if he had paid $4.5 million for his ticket, I bet Universal Studios would have been a great deal happier, too.
Dir: Joseph Losey
Starring Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Noël Coward
Watched on Shout Factory blu-ray