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Butterfield 8 (1960)
Another "bad girl with a heart of gold" story that won gorgeous Elizabeth Taylor her first Best Actress in a Leading Role Oscar in 1961 (the other for "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" In 1966). The ridiculous transparency of her character's name ("Gloria Wandrous") aside, Taylor brings an implosive vulnerability to her role that is hard to match.
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The male lead Laurence Harvey, playing the rich philanderer Weston Liggett, is probably the one who taught Clint Eastwood how to squint. Tall, lean and chain smoker (like all males in a 60s film), Liggett gets more than he bargained for when he falls in love with part-time model and part-time call girl Gloria who could be reached through the "BUtterfield 8" phone exchange (see the Phone trivia at the end of this review).
Both lead characters are wrecked by feelings of shame and guilt and are in search for some authenticity in their lives, despite themselves.
Gloria makes a living by sleeping with Manhattan's executive-class males and having her own 15 minutes of fame under the sun by posing for magazine photographers as a model for famous fashion houses.
But when she wakes up one morning in Liggett's expensive bed with a $250 left for her on the night stand, she goes berserk. Imagine, a call girl who is insulted for getting paid -- even when Liggett explains in a later scene that the money was for her dress that was torn the night before.
Yet Gloria is no "happy hooker" at all. She is pained for lying to her mother and not living up to her mother's standards. The life she is leading is a clear source of shame for her (thus the implication of a "heart of gold").
Moreover, in a later "talking head" scene Gloria unloads her childhood secrets on her ex-lover and current confidante Steve Carpenter (Eddie Fisher, who was actually married to Elizabeth Taylor at the time this movie was shot) who plays a struggling composer living in a one-room apartment.
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In that scene we learn that Gloria had a sexual relationship with a family friend (an "uncle") when she was only a teenager and she actually liked it. That created a sense of guilt that she could never shake off and thus (we presume) led to her current line of work as a call girl. That's why she hates all the men she beds with while exploiting their wealth and connections.
Liggett, on the other hand, is a chemical engineer who rose to his current station in life not on the basis of his own personal merits but by marrying rich. His patrician wife Emily (played to perfection by Dina Merrill) has been protected from the vagaries of real life by her family's wealth. For the longest time she fails to understand the storm that's raging inside her conflicted husband.
Liggett, tortured by fears that he might be a phony, is further pained to realize that Gloria has bedded practically every man of accomplishment and money in Manhattan. Her specialty is "Ivy League alumni" and he goes through these schools alphabetically. That's why she is depressed about the fact that she has reached Yale and thus the end of the alphabet. Jealousy becomes yet another reason why Liggett starts to lose it. His character starts as a control freak who can handle anything with some cocky sweet talk, money and that squinting stare. At the end we see him as a basket case, unable to control the centrifugal forces pulling his fate apart.
This tragic story (adapted from a 1935 novel by John O'Hara) catapults to its logical conclusion after Gloria decides to leave Liggett behind and move to Boston. The end is not pretty but reflects what ought to have happened. So in that sense it does not disappoint.
Taylor shot this movie for only $125,000. For her next film Cleopatra (1963), she pulled down a hefty $1 million. She always cited this film as one of her least favorite movies, despite the fact that it brought her an Academy Award.
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PHONE TRIVIA: Here is why the "U" in "Butterfield" is printed in UPPER CASE... Back then, telephone exchanges in Manhattan were referred to by names, instead of numbers. Manhattan's Upper East Side had the phone exchange Butterfield 8 (BU8 or 288).
About the Author
What's my Line? Dina Merrill