The V.I.P.s

Buy This Item The V.I.P.s by MGM (Warner)  Available from Amazon  $14.98  on 9-22-2008     According the tradition of "Grand Hotel", this chamber and theatrical work concerns with a famed group of rich people who will meet and intercross their lives while they wait for the departure of a delayed flight. <br /> <br />Margaret Rutherford gave a stand-out performance as a unbearable and capricious old lady, but Rod Taylor and Maggie Smith shared plainly honors in this Major league team of legendary stars: Orson Welles in the role of an ambitious, greedy and tricky filmmaker who avoids by all his means to pay taxes, while Miss Taylor, Richard Burton and Louis Jordan and star the tragic amorous triangle. <br /> <br />As I expressed it before, this is a typical picture of that decade, that may be seen dated in the actual times, but just remember three emblematic films: Ship of fools, The voyage of the damned and Visconti `s Gotterdamenung that dealt with similar existential issues and enjoyed of the well deserved taste of success. <br /> Reader Reviews This swanky trashfest is sort of Grand Hotel set in an airport lounge; as the airline exec who must tend to the pampered types hired to star in this movie puts it, "I have these awful film people to see." Orson Welles plays the hilariously named filmmaker Buda, who blusters, "It is not the purpose of the modern cinema to entertain. We use our cameras today as a surgeon uses his scalpel." Indeed, somenone's been scalpeling headlines out of the tabloids of the day, for Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton helicopter in - fresh from the set of Cleopatra - to play a fabulously wealthy, fabulously famous married couple caught up in the psycho-drama of infidelity. (Where ever do these screenwriters get their ideas?) All of Taylor's dialogue seems to come from her off-screen life. "We're not hiding away - we've done enough of that," she tells the lover she's running off with. "His face! I'll never forget it as long as I live!" she exclaims over her husband's expression when he learns he has lost her. "Oh please," Taylor's lover Louis Jourdan, finally implores, "don't talk like a woman's magazine." (Taylor knows, however, that the audience wants each and every detail to mirror some aspect of her countless marriages.) When her getaway flight is fogged in, Burton returns so the pair can do what they've both been so fabulously overpaid to do - the anything-for-money, dog-and-pony show of playing themselves. Burton: "I've come to abase myself, to grovel at your feet, to beg you to forgive me." Taylor: "You'll find someone else." Burton: "What can he give you that I can't? I'm told he's a very skillful maker of love. Is he? Is he all that much better than me?" Taylor's response required some real acting skill, for here at last was a situation she had never found herself in: "I don't know. That hasn't come into it yet." Burton, speaking up for everyone in the audience, responds - one carefully enunciated word at a time -- "I . . . do . . . not . . . believe . . . you." They struggle, and Burton smashes Taylor's wrist into a full-length mirror (mirrors being a telling metaphor for the sure sign of trouble in the marriage of two vain movie stars, dating all the way back to the finale of Welles's marriage to Rita Hayworth in the shattered hall-of-mirrors climax of The Lady From Shanghai). When push comes to shove, of course, Taylor kisses off Jourdan and hurries to find Burton. The film ends with Burton and Taylor hailing a commoner's ordinary taxi e home, so that we'll know that from now on, they'll be leading a simpler, more down-to-earth existence. It's the funniest gag in the movie.

The V.I.P.s Available from Amazon Price: $14.98 Updated on 9-22-2008.

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