How did this unofficial Liz Taylor film series get started? When will it end?? I've been through all her major adult works now, so all that's left is her early supporting roles (Father of the Bride, Little Women) and kiddie stuff (National Velvet). Perhaps I'll call it a day.
Taylor fascinates me. I wish to do battle with her, to conquer and claim her. She is less an icon — an abstraction — than Marilyn, whom we think of in terms of (fetishized) images and the play of light. Liz is rather more tangible, present in substance and body and heat, and for that reason all the more intoxicating. With Liz you smell her, breathe her in...and it's not perfume, but the tingle of female sweat even when dressed to the nines. The urge toward her is unthinking, primal.
From Giant (1956) through to the above 1967 titles Taylor reigned as Hollywood's leading dramatic actress, despite the limited imagination and range in her choice of roles. It's always either an historical epic or a squirming stage play, preferably with homosexual subtext and progressive social mores. Liz stars as an eminently desirable, probably unstable, woman of means and prestige (possibly by marriage) mated to an emasculated sad sack who, by his impotence in the presence of this carnal goddess, inspires her pleading fits of rage and occasional self-destruction. It is foregone that the sack, whether Montgomery Clift, Richard Burton, Marlon Brando, Eddie Fisher or Rock Hudson, if unable to prove himself worthy, will have his guts torn out by her claws. However, should the man give fight — it will be a ferocious battle of both physical strength and will — and by heroic feats best her, she will thereafter cleave to him as fiercely as once she resisted.
The Taming of the Shrew kind of spoils the fun by staging this dynamic so literally, but there is pleasure in taking the knock-down-drag-out sexfight to its cartoonish extreme, especially since the unlikely cut of Taylor's bodice (more like a dessert tray) permits her breasts to lunge and threaten.
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