The production values of this prototypically 60's Hollywood product are very high, a glittering facade for puerile and intellectually shallow content. Free-spirit single mom Elizabeth Taylor seeks to raise her illegitimate son according to her own Bohemian lights, including home-schooling. The child is ordered by authorities to be sent to a strict, private religious school because of his "troublesome" nature (this nascent juvenile delinquent can quote Chaucer from memory, but be that as it may......). Thus we have the setup for the Dionysian bombshell Taylor's encounter with the Appolonian authority figure of Richard Burton, the school's headmaster. During the development of this utterly predictable love affair, Taylor's character is made to utter every tired, threadbare, exhausted nostrum from the heyday of the 60's, when trendy radicalism and burgeoning feminism were au courant. Burton, just like the establishment of the time, has no coherent response, but we are supposed to believe that in some sort of not readily apparent way he has been "changed" by his roll in the hay with La Liz. The whole thing is thin and unconvincing. For me the best moment was when Taylor's kiddo expressed a desire to return to the dreaded hotbed of religious brainwashing to which he had been consigned ("I like it there"). Poor mom! If one can suspend one's critical faculties, the thing can be enjoyed as camp, but as serious moviemaking? Nah.
Review of The Sandpiper
