Grimossfer Clever and entertaining enough to recommend even to members of the 1%

Rio Hayward All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

Neive Bellamy Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Phillipa Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

Bob-1914 The Sandpiper is interesting for its buffoonish take on the art and counter cultures of the 1960's. Taylor plays a struggling iconoclastic painter who somehow manages to live in the coolest place on earth, a designer home hanging off the cliffs of Big Sir with a view of the Pacific. Charles Bronson plays a beatnik sculptor, right. And they all hang out with a cool black guy artist, played by James Edwards. Burton is the Dr. Rev. Edward Hewitt, a cleric who falls in love with Taylors' breasts. The artwork sucks. The portrait of Taylor that the Bronson character sculpts is atrocious. She looks like she's straining on the toilet. The real artist, Edmund Kara, is a great sculptor but this piece is a mess. Taylor's endless paintings of the symbolic "sandpiper" also suck. They were painted by Elizabeth Duquette, the socialite wife of Tony Duquette, the great designer. They lack even rudimentary rendering ability; no sense of form, a mess of individual feathers that add up to neither a feeling of the whole nor a celebration of pattern, they're clumsy. Only a Hollywood moron with money would buy this junk. On the upside, the music is lush and the scenery sublime.

blanche-2 Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton star in "The Sandpiper," a 1965 film also starring Morgan Mason (James Mason's son) and Eva Marie Saint, Charles Bronson, and Robert Webber.Taylor plays Laura Reynolds, a free-thinking single mother living and painting in Big Sur with her young son (Mason). Her son gets into trouble, not for the first time, and this time, the judge orders him to San Simeon School, headed up by an Episcopalian priest, Edward Hewitt(Burton) and his wife (Saint). From the first, Edward is struck by Laura's beauty and finds himself at her house more often than necessary. Laura has a man, Cos (Bronson), around her who is doing a nude sculpture of her, and Edward finds out about that, and that someone he knows (Webber) has a past with Laura. Edward and Laura fall deeply in love, and it presents problems.The sandpiper in the title refers to Laura's rescuing of a wounded sandpiper and caring for it until it is able to fly free - freedom is a strong theme in the film, freeing oneself of the bonds of religion, marriage, rules, and what people think."The Sandpiper" is directed by Vincente Minnelli, but it's really not up to his usual standards, except for the glorious Big Sur scenery. Of course he usually worked with better scripts than this one. The film is responsible for the huge hit, "The Shadow of Your Smile." Seeing Taylor and Burton together is always fun, knowing how much in love they were, and they have good chemistry here. Taylor, her hair down, is beautiful and tanned -- she was 33 at the time of filming -- though she's not totally convincing as a hippie type. For one thing, her clothes are too beautiful. She is, however, convincing as a woman in love. Burton, with that incredible voice, is good in his role, but for the most part, Burton was wasted in the movies. Having grown up so poor, he liked the money he made from film and never minded if the script wasn't equal to his great abilities.This movie isn't fun like "The VIPs" or trashy like "Boom!" or excellent like "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" It's just a Taylor-Burton vehicle. For some of us, that's enough.

highwaytourist This film was designed to take advantage of public curiosity about the recent marriage of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, who were kind of the Bragelina of the 1960's. Their star power were enough to make this picture a hit at the box office. Here, Taylor plays a free-spirited beatnik artist and single mother. She lives on the beach in a glamorous "shack" and makes a living as an artist while raising her son. Very touching. Her son, played by Morgan Mason, gets into trouble and winds up being sent to a religious boarding school. The school is run by the Reverend Richard Burton, along with his pretty and supportive but staid wife, Eva Marie Saint. Well, Burton is going through a mid-life crisis and it comes to fruition when he first meets Taylor and is taken by her heavy make-up and "look at my breasts" wardrobes. So he visits her home to help her keep tabs on her son's progress at school and meets some of her beatnik friends, including Charles Bronson, absurdly cast as a hippie sculptor. What happens then? Well, after taking forever to set up the story, Taylor and Burton fall in love and have an affair, to the surprise of no one. In the process, we are treated to the majestic Big Sur beaches and beautiful music, including the Oscar-winning theme song "The Shadow of Your Smile." In fact, the music and seascapes are more interesting than the story and characters, who just talk everything to death while the story drags on in predictable fashion. This would have been a better coffee table book than motion picture. My recommendation? Watch the opening credits and closing credits, which are by far the best parts of the movie.

James Hitchcock "The Sandpiper" was the second in a number of films ("The VIPs" was the first) made together by Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. Their romance, which had begun on the set of "Cleopatra", had both enthralled and scandalised the public, and the studios wanted to make the most of their notoriety. The public perception of Dick and Liz as a glamorous but scandalous couple can only have been increased by the subject-matter of "The Sandpiper". At one time a film about a clergyman engaged in an adulterous affair would have been an unthinkable violation of the Production Code. By 1965, however, the Code, although not quite dead, was no longer in robust health, and a film on this subject, although still highly controversial, was no longer impossible.Taylor's character, Laura Reynolds, is an unmarried mother who works as an artist and lives with her nine-year-old son Danny in an isolated California beach house. (The film's title derives from an injured sandpiper which she rescues and nurses back to health thereafter and becomes a symbol of freedom). Danny's behaviour, however, has got him into trouble with the law, and a judge orders her to send the boy to a local boarding school. Laura is reluctant to do this; she is a free spirit who distrusts any form of institutionalised education. To make matters worse from her point of view, the school is run by the Episcopalian Church, and she is an atheist whose attitude to religion is one of positive hostility rather than mere indifference. Nevertheless, she realises that she must comply with the judge's order or risk losing custody of her boy.Burton plays Dr. Edward Hewitt, an Episcopalian priest and headmaster of the school. Although his values are very different from Laura's, Edward is something of an idealist and is becoming disillusioned with his life at the school, feeling that he is neither a priest nor an educator but merely a fund-raiser. (The school is currently engaged in a major fund-raising drive to build a new chapel, something Edward feels is unnecessary). Edward takes a great interest in Danny's progress and finds himself increasingly drawn towards Laura, possibly because she is so different both from him and from his wife Claire. Claire is attractive and supportive of her husband but rather staid and conventional compared to the bohemian Laura. Eventually Edward and Laura begin an affair, even though he is a married man. (This plot line reminded me of Iris Murdoch's novel "The Sandcastle", published a few years before "The Sandpiper", which also dealt with an adulterous affair between a married older schoolmaster at a boarding school and a young female artist).Danny himself does not play a major role, being more of a plot device than a character in his own right. I felt that this was a weakness, given that one of the themes of the film is two different philosophies of education. Laura's view is that all formal educational establishments, particularly conservative boarding schools like Dr Hewitt's, are undesirable because they exist in order to turn children into conventional conformists. Her own solution, however, home-schooling Danny in a remote part of the world away from any other children and without a father-figure in his life, struck me as being likely to turn him into a self-centred loner, although the film rather shies away from criticising Laura on this point. The opening scenes in which Danny shoots a deer strike a particularly jarring note. It seemed to me highly improbable that a woman like Laura, whose whole philosophy seems to be one of living in harmony with nature, would allow her young son to have a rifle and then, when he uses it to kill an animal out of wanton curiosity, shrug the whole thing off as a harmless youthful escapade.Elizabeth Taylor looks stunning, but neither she nor Burton are really at their best here. Burton is certainly not as good as he was as the world-weary spy in "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold", also made in 1965. The relationship between Edward and Laura is not based simply upon sexual attraction, but upon a growing realisation that despite their differences they are kindred spirits. The unbeliever Laura, paradoxically, has more in common with Edward's Christian idealism than does the conventionally pious Claire. The trouble is that one never really senses in Burton's performance the idealistic religious believer hiding behind the mask of the formal and pedantic schoolmaster. Taylor always comes across as slightly too glamorous to be altogether convincing as a proto-hippie.The film contains some attractive photography of the Californian coastal scenery (although the colours in the indoor scenes are often rather dull) and there is a notable musical score, including the song "The Shadow of Your Smile". As a psychological and emotional drama it has its points of interest, but overall it is a rather dated sixties period-piece, most interesting as a record of that decade's official Golden Couple. 6/10