Elizabeth Taylor
Page 8
RELEASE DATE: November 15, 1951
RUN TIME: 81 minutes, black and white
SUMMARY: Advertising wizards Mike Frye and Deborah Patterson come up with a very profitable plan of putting the old movies of Western star Smoky Callaway on television, à la the latter-day fame of Hopalong Cassidy. Kids discovering Smoky for the first time clamor for a personal appearance. It falls to Mike and Deborah to produce him, but the former star has taken to booze since his glory days and is nowhere to be found. Mike and Deborah then produce a look-alike, Stretch Barnes. But the plan goes awry when the real Smoky rears his head, and an epic battle ensues between him and Stretch, as Smoky insists on just deserts from his resurrected fame.
The real Elizabeth Taylor greets the bogus Smoky Callaway. She appeared in this scene with Dorothy McGuire, Fred MacMurray, and Howard Keel.
notes
CALLAWAY WENT THATAWAY, THOUGH A SCREWBALL COMEDY, is an interesting look into the early days of television, concerning the resurrected fame of old stars when their films were rerun on television for the first time. In this case it was a series of old Westerns so popular with boys of the era. Also of interest is Howard Keel playing a dual role, and the spectacle of the extended fight scene he has with himself. Elizabeth made a cameo appearance as herself in the movie, as did other familiar MGM faces, including Esther Williams and Clark Gable.
REVIEW
“That old team of Hollywood sharpshooters, Norman Panama and Melvin Frank, whose writing, directing, and producing are now being done for M-G-M, has leveled the sights of satire upon a sitting duck in Callaway Went Thataway. . . . The target at which they are sniping with cheerful but deadly aim is the typical cowboy idol of the television fans, and they are riddling their vulnerable victim with juicily splattering slugs. But when the boys get through with their spoofing and the slug-juice has been wiped away, it is not the victim so much as his exploiters who are pocked with embarrassing holes.”
—The New York Times (Bosley Crowther)
Love Is Better Than Ever
METRO-GOLDWYN-MAYER
CAST
Larry Parks Jud Parker
Elizabeth Taylor Anastacia “Stacie” Macaboy
Josephine Hutchinson Mrs. Macaboy
Tom Tully Mr. Macaboy
Ann Doran Mrs. Levoy
Elinor Donahue Pattie Marie Levoy
Kathleen Freeman Mrs. Kahrney
Doreen McCann Albertina Kahrney
Alex Gerry Hamlet
Dick Wessel Smittie
CREDITS
William H. Wright (producer); Stanley Donen (director); Ruth Brooks Flippen (screenplay); Harold Rosson (photography); Lennie Hayton (music); Cedric Gibbons, Gabriel Scognamillo (art directors); Edwin B. Willis, Keough Gleason (set decorations); Douglas Shearer (sound); George Boemler (editor); Helen Rose (costumes); Sydney Guilaroff (hairstylist); William Tuttle (makeup)
RELEASE DATE: February 23, 1952
RUN TIME: 81 minutes, black and white
SUMMARY: Dance instructor Stacie Macaboy attends a dance convention in New York to learn the latest trends to bring back to her school. Instead, her time in New York is monopolized by talent agent Jud Parker. By the end of their whirlwind week together Stacie is in love, but Jud is merely out for a good time. Stacie returns to her small-town dance school with a broken heart, no new routines, and is the target of gossip surrounding how she spent her time in New York. Stacie uses the mild scandal as a means of bringing Jud to her, convincing him to pretend to be engaged so she can gain back her unsullied reputation. Jud eventually realizes he would prefer that their staged engagement end in a real wedding instead of a breakup.
Girl chases boy in Love Is Better Than Ever. | Jud and Stacie ponder the end of their time together in New York.
A temporary fight before final fade-out, with Parks
REVIEWS
“A reasonable amount of lightly paced fun is concocted to sustain it for the over 80-minute course. Larry Parks and Elizabeth Taylor team and each adds to the amusement offered in the Ruth Brooks Flippen original script. . . . Dialog is glib, with plenty of flip phrasing, and pacing is excellent. Donen’s guidance is generally good.”
—Variety (“Brog”)
“The presence of the new and muchly pictured Mrs. Michael Wilding (Elizabeth Taylor) in the cast of Love Is Better Than Ever is the only remotely valid reason that this reviewer can see for spending an hour and twenty minutes looking at this film. And then it is only valid if you don’t pay much attention to what she does—excepting so far as it brings her within your visual range. For the ornamental beauty of Mrs. Wilding in a variety of dancing costumes is considerably counter-balanced by the trivia she has to play.”
—The New York Times (Bosley Crowther)
Hairstyle test of Elizabeth as Stacie Macaboy
Elizabeth’s brief costumes as a dance-school instructor provided ample opportunity to show off her legs.
notes
LOVE IS BETTER THAN EVER WAS MADE IN LATE 1950 AND early 1951, but its release was withheld by MGM for more than a year due to the scandal surrounding Larry Parks after he admitted before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) that he had been a member of the Communist Party. It was the height of the Red Scare, when HUAC was conducting extensive investigations into any possible infiltration of communists in the film industry who could potentially impose un-American views upon an unsuspecting public in their films. Many careers were destroyed by the investigations.
One among the casualties was Parks, who rose to the upper echelons of stardom briefly in 1946, when he starred as Al Jolson in The Jolson Story, a role which earned him an Academy Award nomination. By the time Love Is Better Than Ever was completed his reputation was tarnished to such a degree that MGM considered the film unfit for release. An Elizabeth Taylor film was not to languish too long, however, so Love Is Better Than Ever quietly tiptoed into theaters in February 1952. It opened to poor notices and did nothing to help Parks’s flagging career; but neither did it do any harm to Elizabeth’s, as audiences were by now intrigued by everything she did.
Interest in Elizabeth’s private life was soaring after her breakup with Nicky Hilton. Fans were anxious to see whom she would link up with next. The man turned out to be Love Is Better Than Ever director Stanley Donen. Donen had just finished directing Fred Astaire in Royal Wedding. His career was on the rise through his collaborations with Gene Kelly, who even made a cameo appearance in Love Is Better Than Ever. They had made On the Town a year earlier and Donen’s next directorial effort would be the classic Singin’ in the Rain.
A Swiss movie magazine cover, with Parks
1951 magazine cover. Fans wanted to know which man she might be phoning after her split from Nicky Hilton.
With Larry Parks, whose presence in the film almost prevented its release
At the Mocambo nightclub with director Stanley Donen, her fiancé for a brief time
Love Is Better Than Ever may have been comparatively insignificant in Donen’s repertoire of the period, but for the director it was momentous because he fell head over heels in love with Elizabeth during production. He said at the time, “She was the most beautiful woman on earth.” Elizabeth became serious about him too, but her mother Sara did not like him. Donen used aspects of his experiences with Elizabeth’s mother in the film, including the messages and missed calls from her mother while the couple was out on a date. According to Donen, he and Elizabeth were engaged at the time she left for England to make Ivanhoe, and it came as a shock to him back in Hollywood to receive the news that she had married Michael Wilding. Donen’s love for Elizabeth comes across in Love Is Better Than Ever through a succession of lingering close-ups on her throughout, making the film a time capsule commemorating their past romance, though not one of the finer credits of either of their artistic careers.
“She was the most beautiful woman on earth.”
— STANLEY DONEN
Ivanhoe
METRO-GOLDWYN-MAYER
CAST
Robert Taylor Ivanhoe
Elizabeth Taylor Rebecca
Joan Fontaine Rowena
George Sanders De Bois-Guilbert
Emlyn Williams Wamba
Robert Douglas Sir Hugh de Bracy
Finlay Currie Cedric
Felix Aylmer Isaac
Francis DeWolff Front de Boeuf
Norman Wooland King Richard
CREDITS
Pandro S. Berman (producer); Richard Thorpe (director); Noel Langley (screenplay); Aeneas MacKenzie (adaptation), based on story by Sir Walter Scott; F. A. Young (photography); Miklós Rózsa (music); Alfred Junge (art director); A. W. Watkins (sound); Frank Clarke (editor); Roger Furse (costumes); Joan Johnstone (hairstylist); Charles Parker (makeup)
RELEASE DATE: February 20, 1953
RUN TIME: 106 minutes, color
Taylor and Taylor, the reunited pair of Conspirator
SUMMARY: Ivanhoe returns from battle in the Crusades to find England ruled by the wicked Norman Prince John, while King Richard the Lionhearted is imprisoned in Austria. Ivanhoe’s mission is to raise ransom funds and see Prince John deposed, but his favoring King Richard is not a popular position among Saxons in England, including the lovely Lady Rowena and his own father, Cedric. Meanwhile, anti-Semitism reigns among the Normans and Ivanhoe’s friendship with the wealthy Jew Isaac and his daughter Rebecca brings dishonor upon him and ultimately leads Rebecca to be tried as a suspected witch. After exciting jousting tournaments and epic adventures, and even a cameo by Robin Hood, Ivanhoe and King Richard triumph over evil.
With George Sanders, who played the double-crossing De Bois-Guilbert
As the lovely Jewish maiden Rebecca
A visit to the set by Elizabeth’s friend Peter Lawford
A rare portrait of Elizabeth in the Ivanhoe period
REVIEWS
“The beauty of Ivanhoe is that there is little pretention in it, and no vulgarity disguised as grandeur. It is simple, fast, and entertaining, a romantic daydream in action.”
—New York Herald Tribune (Otis L. Guernsey, Jr.)
“[A] brilliantly colored tapestry of drama and spectacle . . . They have emphasized such episodes in the novel as the beating of Isaac and the trial of Rebecca as a witch to highlight the sobering implications of the universal injustice of social bigotry. In this aspect of the drama, a remarkable forcefulness is achieved and the picture brings off a serious lesson in fairness and tolerance not customary in spectacle films. Credit for this may be given to Elizabeth Taylor, in the role of Rebecca, and Felix Aylmer, as Isaac, as well as to the men who made the film. For both of these able performers handle with grace and eloquence the frank and faceted characters of the rejected Jews.”
—The New York Times (Bosley Crowther)
As Rebecca, a persecuted Jewish woman in 1192 England
notes
MGM CAST AND CREW PACKED UP AND MOVED THEIR CINEMATIC accoutrements to Elstree Studios in June 1951 to begin production on Ivanhoe, which London newspapers reported to be “the largest-scale film in point of sets and cast ever to be made in England.” Novels, stories, and poems by Sir Walter Scott had been committed to film many times. Most popular for transition to film were his novels The Bride of Lammermoor and Rob Roy, and the poem “Lochinvar.” Ivanhoe, Scott’s epic novel of 1819, had reached the screen twice before, in long-forgotten editions made in the U.S. and Britain, both in 1913.
Producer Pandro Berman had been keen to take on Ivanhoe since the 1930s, but it was not until after World War II, when much filming by the Hollywood studios was being done in England again, that Berman began preparations to put the film into production. The producer wanted to create as authentic a picture of late twelfth-century England as possible, and therefore had art directors, costume designers, and historical experts on the period researching for years before he felt ready to begin principal photography.
Elizabeth’s Conspirator costar, Robert Taylor, fresh from his great success in the historical epic Quo Vadis, was cast in the title role. Elizabeth would play the beautiful Jewess, Rebecca, a part that almost went to Robert Taylor’s Quo Vadis costar, Deborah Kerr, when Elizabeth briefly threatened to drop out of the production. Other lead roles went to Joan Fontaine, George Sanders, and Emlyn Williams. Filming primarily outdoors between July and September 1951 often required very early morning hours, overtime, and work on weekends as needed to take advantage of good weather.
Any hardships connected to filming were more than tolerable for Elizabeth, who was in high spirits as she was falling in love again with a new man she met in England, Michael Wilding. Wilding was a respected British actor, star of the prestigious 1942 U.K. production In Which We Serve. In Hollywood he starred for Alfred Hitchcock in Under Capricorn and Stage Fright. Wilding possessed great charm but was not the kind of man Elizabeth would come to love and admire most. “I need a strong man,” she once said, “Some women need to dominate, others need to be dominated. I’m one of the last kind.” But Wilding was older and cultured where Elizabeth was young and educated only by MGM, and she appreciated that she could grow and learn from him up to a certain point. Wilding met Elizabeth at the time his fourteen-year marriage to Kay Young was ending. The Wildings divorced in December 1951 and two months later, Elizabeth and Michael Wilding were wed.
As for Ivanhoe, the film that brought her to England and Wilding, it premiered in London in June 1952, in New York in July, and then opened across other European markets throughout the rest of the year. It grossed $6.2 million in domestic film rentals, earning distinction as MGM’s top moneymaker of the year. At the Academy Awards Ivanhoe earned nominations for Best Picture, Best Music, and Best Color Cinematography.
“Some women need to dominate, others need to be dominated. I’m one of the last kind.”
— ELIZABETH TAYLOR
Modeling the back of her gown for the film’s premiere
The premiere of Ivanhoe, on the arm of new husband Michael Wilding
At a movie premiere in London during the making of Ivanhoe
A publicity shot from the Ivanhoe period
The Girl Who Had Everything
METRO-GOLDWYN-MAYER
CAST
Elizabeth Taylor Jean Latimer
Fernando Lamas Victor Y. Raimondi
William Powell Steve Latimer
Gig Young Vance Court
James Whitmore Charles “Chico” Menlow
Robert Burton John Ashmond
William Walker Julian
George Brand Senator
Frank Dae Old Man Kinkaid
Elmer Peterson himself
CREDITS
Armand Deutsch (producer); Richard Thorpe (director); Art Cohn (screenplay), based on novel A Free Soul by Adela Rogers St. Johns; Paul Vogel (photography); André Previn (music); Cedric Gibbons, Randall Duell (art directors); Edwin B. Willis, Jack D. Moore (set decorations); Douglas Shearer (sound); Sid Sidman (assistant director); Ben Lewis (editor); Helen Rose (costumes); Sydney Guilaroff (hairstylist); William Tuttle (makeup)
RELEASE DATE: March 27, 1953
RUN TIME: 69 minutes, black and white
High tension with William Powell and Fernando Lamas
SUMMARY: Steve Latimer is a hot-shot attorney defending Victor Raimondi, a well-known racketeer. Steve is willing to put forth his best efforts to save the criminal from jail time, but it is an entirely different matter when Victor begins dating his daughter, Jean. As a single father, Steve brought her up with a loving but laissez faire attitude that has resulted in a relationship with Jean more resembling friendship than father-daughter rapport. Jean discards her dependable boyfriend Vance Court, and will not take Steve’s advice to stay away from the dangerous Victor. In time she learns for herself that Victor has a terrifying violent streak, but not before becoming his fiancée, and dodging gunfire and the authorities.
REVIEWS
“Talents of William Powell, Elizabeth Taylor, and Fernando Lamas are more or less w
asted in the talky, implausible plot, and the dramatics seem dated, even though such modern touches as telecasts of U.S. crime investigation hearings are used.”
—Variety (“Brog”)
“Miss Taylor is her usual beautiful self, gracing the screen in formals, bathing suits and sports clothes.”
—Motion Picture Herald
Elizabeth waits as a scene is set up for The Girl Who Had Everything.
Selecting her breakfast pastry on the set
Elizabeth was an expert at touching up her own makeup for the camera.
Behind the scenes with costar Powell and husband Michael Wilding
notes
THE GIRL WHO HAD EVERYTHING HAD THE MAKINGS OF A fine film. It was a remake of a Norma Shearer/Lionel Barrymore/Clark Gable movie called A Free Soul. Made in the pre-Code era, before Hollywood’s morals watchdogs enforced strict censorship on the screen, the sizzling drama had earned Barrymore an Oscar and nominations for Shearer and director Clarence Brown. It was based on a novel by groundbreaking journalist Adela Rogers St. Johns. Add to the above the star power of Elizabeth in 1953, the charm of the screen’s newest Latin lover, Fernando Lamas, and the reverence earned by William Powell, and it would all give movie audiences high expectations. For all its potential it turned out to be a programmer for MGM, badly diluted from the excitement of A Free Soul by stricter censorship mandates in place more than twenty years after the release of the original film. Granted, a B movie for MGM was apt to be mistaken for an A film at other studios, but The New York Times did not even bother to review The Girl Who Had Everything.