Never The Twain Shall Meet

The Sandpiper is made in the center of Hollywood's chamber of horrors, the bloated, nauseating and producing rich '60s. The film has the eternal icons, turtle-doves Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in the lead roles. And Charles Bronson and Eva Maria Saint in sensational supporting cast. You have to go back to life and film in the mid 60s to begin to understand this movie. Burton plays a pompous, Catholic boarding school headmaster who turns out basically to hate himself, because his spiritual charity is corrupted into a fight for money and building projects. Taylor is an atheist, a self-chosen single mother, who teaches her son, and who hates, not just men, but the world. Taylor's son is being forcibly removed and placed on Burton's school. Then we have the salad. See, you could almost believe that it could be the basis for a film drama, 2011. But today we would not make such a film, either at my home or in the U.S. At least not with this conflict. Back then, the showdown between the two poles were probably more dull, more new. Today, the camps have positioned themselves in the action, and trying to get the two worlds to meet has long since dead-ended, a doomed battle in quilt and obdurate positions on each side. The battle has been fought and no one is wiser. Even in the mid-60s, this conflict may, however, not have been easy to produce.

The elegant filmaestethic, champion Vincente Minnelli dare - lifted by the powerful actors. It is precisely the obdurate positions the movie makes up with. See it to realize its courage. See the scenes Minnelli made during the last years of the Production Codes lifetime, but which you probably would not even make today in Hollywood (a boy shoots a deer with a rifle, a nude Taylor, an unfaithful Catholic protagonist). You would probably not be able to sell the product - (if ever gotten past the investors and producers) - before the over-sensitive media had ripped the product apart, ridiculed it. Cinematically and actingwise it is aged bad. But you should see the film with contemporary glasses. This is crucial. Otherwise, it quickly becomes a cliché. The following elements are prominent:

The contrast between nature and culture. Scenes from Big Sur, which symbolize nature and freedom. Scenes from the houses, school, and Taylor's house, which symbolizes the prison. The symbolism of the title may be thick and corny, but the bird that seeks to return to his own jail, is so fine a picture of what Burton encounters in this freedom story, when it turns out that the person, Taylor, who motivated his showdown with his own corruption, herself represents the very narrow world view he is trying to do away with. Taylor's reaction when Burton returned after telling his wife about their love, is probably superficial but to Minnelli it will serve to show that the opposite of his phoney-holy church, namely Taylor's bid for humanism, is as bogus and limited as his own. She can't contain him anyway. And therefore he must continue, as the bird, who finally finds freedom, but must recognize that unfortunately freedom goes hand in hand with the loneliness. But also for Taylor's cynicism there may be a way out. That she also got her worldview challenged, appears in the film's last scene, where her painting for the first time shows people.

So why does not Minnelli think that the two should have each other, one might ask. It's art as a concept that weaves Taylor and Burton's worlds into each other, painting, sculpture. It used to be song and dance that serves this purpose with Minnelli. But the ending is happy for Minnelli, who at heart is a realist, for they both find themselves again by being absorbed into their opposites (Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 64). But there is no common future for the two opposites, though they have moved themselves a meter or more. It is shown in the film's last scene where Burton's spiritual arrogance on the rock is above Taylor's hate of the establishment attitude on the beach. They are trapped in different worlds. And the worlds could not meet. One might have hoped we had done better half a century later.

The film's dramatic conflict between Taylor and Burton offers an elegant allusion to the battle between Orson Welles, who bought a cabin in Big Sur, where she lives, and magnate WR Hearst, whose life Citizen Kane was based on, and whose castle is located in San Simeon, where Burton's school is located. It's the same battle Taylor and Burton in a way are fighting. Minnelli's message is that both are two sad parts of the same self-righteous piece, each of which may move down from the ivory tower to find themselves or the other.