Let’s take stock, shall we?
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Liz in an orange housecoat? Check. |
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Husband with a dark secret? Check. |
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Comic Spanish housekeeper? Check. |
Sliced-off nipples? Naked horsey rides? Whippings? Oops! Wrong movie! Sorry to disappoint you, Naomi… but enough people seem to like Reflections in a Golden Eye (or as I call the restored version, Reflections in a Jug of Maple Syrup) that it seemed too respectable for this Roundtable. Instead we’ve got:
Night Watch (1973)
… Taylor’s one unambiguous horror film.
#1 by Naomi on August 26, 2011 - 11:09 pm
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My only disappointment is that the print I saw was in even worse shape than the one you found– the darkness in the climax was complete rather than near complete. Seeing it chopped into fifteen-minute pieces, always in mid-scene and sometimes in mid-sentence, probably didn’t help either.
I had never heard of Reflections in a Golden Eye until you mentioned it. Still not sure if that gap in my cinematic knowledge would have been better left unfilled.
#2 by Braineater on August 27, 2011 - 9:31 am
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And here I thought I was being clever by not reviewing the film I thought you meant. Oops! Though come to think of it, I guess it was red Liz was wearing in Reflections….
#3 by lyzard on August 27, 2011 - 12:19 am
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Reflections In A Golden Eye gets a lot of bad press, but I don’t think it’s terrible. Overwrought and weird, yes – and of course, it’s a film about homosexuality that has no intention of trying to come to terms with its own subject matter. However, I suspect the real issue for a lot of people is that Robert Forster spends most of the film completely naked.
#4 by JessicaR on August 27, 2011 - 12:41 am
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That’s only an issue for me in the sense of “Damn, dude was hot in his youth.” My big issue with the film is whatever the hell the actor playing Julie Harris’ house boy was doing in his scenes.
#5 by RogerBW on August 27, 2011 - 2:55 am
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Sounds to me as though, if Night Watch hadn’t had Taylor in it, it might have been a respectable small earner, still largely forgotten by now but not deleted from history the way it has been.
Even so, going by the description it does seem a bit of an old-fashioned story (mildly surprising given that the play only came out in 1972)… this was after all the same year as The Exorcist – or, perhaps to get closer to the real topic of this film, The Way We Were.
#6 by Braineater on August 27, 2011 - 9:37 am
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You’re right: it’s a very old-fashioned story, though the play itself came out in 1972 and was a big hit. It’s the sort of thing Hammer would have done very well in black and white a decade earlier. Funny, considering what Hammer was actually doing in 1973. But it’s true: any film with Liz Taylor in it had become, by definition, a Liz Taylor film, and that hasn’t helped its reputation.
And The Way We Were could use a few more murders, I think.
#7 by lyzard on August 27, 2011 - 3:16 pm
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I was thinking as I reading that it sounded very much like one of the Hammer “mini-Psychos“.
#8 by Jen S on August 27, 2011 - 11:47 am
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Okay, my fortieth birthday’s coming up in November, and all I asked my husband to get me was a cast iron pan and some MST sets. I’m going to tape your first paragraph to his eyeballs and make him chant “I Am Very Lucky, I Am Getting Off So Easy” five hundred times.
Seeing as this film is almost impossible to find, is there anywhere I could get spoiled and read/see the ending?
#9 by Braineater on August 27, 2011 - 12:10 pm
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Well, until about a week ago or so, it was on YouTube. It’s been taken down just in time for my post (ain’t that always the way?)